This morning, I had to send the federal government three thousand dollars, which they will use to continue killing people around the world. 

The $3k is in addition to the $8k I already paid in 2025. Honestly, $11k is much less than I’ve paid in years past, but it feels so much worse.

I imagine that it feels even worse to the people who are under the bombs that my tax money will pay for.

The killing is needed so that we continue burning as much oil as possible. Cheap oil is needed to power our transportation machines, as well as the war machines. 

It’s all so cyclical and predictable and sickening, and it feels as if my very soul is being crushed under the wheels of these machines. I don’t think I can be a part of this system any more.

In my youth I was raised to be “conservative”. When I was 26 I joined the US Army, because I was naive and brainwashed to believe the lies of the federal government. I spent two years in Baghdad, enacting the United States imperial, colonialist agenda. It was there that I finally began to see through the lies.

When my time in the US Army came to an end, I was recruited to help build the federal surveillance state. It was 2009, jobs were scarce, and the money was good. For five years I helped build the systems that kept track of “terrorists”.

If I say too much, they will come for me too. Putting me in a concrete box for the rest of my life is much more “profitable” than killing me, so if I disappear, that’s probably where I am. 

After I became disillusioned with the federal government, I went to go work for “big business”. For ten years I helped build machines and systems that are very profitable. I lived in a wealthy suburb and drove a fancy car to work every day. 

I say I drove, but mostly I sat in traffic, burning precious oil to keep my body comfortable while I struggled to safely navigate through the endless press of machines. The stress caused my body to attack itself and gave me a variety of chronic conditions that I will have to suffer with for the rest of my life. 

A few years ago I was “downsized”. I was sick and bitter, so I sold my car, moved halfway across the country, and got a city job. For the last year I’ve helped maintain the precious water system that keeps hundreds of thousands of Portlanders alive. I never have to drive a car, I never fly on planes, and I get free physical therapy every time I leave the house. This is the happiest life I’ve ever had.

But the system will not be stopped by my simple actions. Oil is profitable. Greed is attractive. Bombs fall across the middle east, paid for by my taxes and guided by my life’s labor. People older than I am sleep on the steps of vacant buildings down the street, trying and failing to stay out of the cold, wind, and rain.

Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.

Yeats wrote those words in 1919, in a time of world war, at the beginning of the age of oil. I wonder if he felt the same way I do? It certainly seems like it. 

I don’t know where to go from here. There’s no washing the blood off my hands – the stains will never come out – but I won’t contribute to the horrors any longer. I don’t know what actions I will take, but I cannot continue to empower the US government to kill people for oil. I cannot continue to support greed.

May the goddess of life have mercy on my soul. On all of our souls.

– Kate