I went to school to learn science. They go to school to network and make deals and learn how to 'negotiate by intimidation." I feel I wasted my life on peace and love.....being kind to women and children.....not stealing even when no one is watching and sharing whatever I had generously with those who had less.
I don't believe my taxman or my government should harrass me. I know I've focussed all my efforts on serving them so that in the last decades they owe me some million or more in dollars for all that I have done that I wasn't paid for but did out of the 'goodness of my heart'. All the time I'm doing government's job. They're paid but I do the work they didn't do and I'm not paid for. I'm waiting for the back pay and the class action suits and all the other solutions that are now wanting. I know I have a heart and I wonder why my government seems so heartless.
If government people in general worked as hard as I worked then we'd all be rich beyond our wildest dreams. Indeed if we had the 'amount' of government we truly 'needed' then we'd not have to pay taxes because we'd be rich on the savings from getting rid of the immense waste that government creates.
Now that's the kind of rage and self pity and nonsense that goes through my mind when I'm in the thick of dealing with the criminals, misinformed collection agents and beaurocratic bullies, paid thugs and self aggrandising small minded Los Vegas style brown shirt bag men #*!!!*$####. It's not enlightenment. It's not spiritual and loving.
I'm old enough to know the billions of dollars wasted by my government and all the theft and corruption in the leadership, the lies and waste and ignorance. So I don't appreciate the smug and superior attitudes and threats of taxmen and taxwomen who delight in doing their jobs while not allowing me to do mine. Every time I talk to them I'm not working. They're getting paid but we're not. We only get paid for doing real work, real production, creation, not taxing everything that moves or breathes or doesn't. I want my government and it's taxmen to cut the fat and not have all the country tighten their belts another notch for the glory of wasteful, corrupt excessive government. And of course the government would rather squeaze the citizens. Who needs citizens really!
I want to quit. I want to walk away and say, get yourself another pansy. Half this province is on the underground economy and probably half the government is on some sort of take. Indeed when I worked with the government that's all I saw people doing, stiffing the tax payers, finding ways to do the least and get the most. And the leadership was the same genetic sorts who lead the Charge of the Light Brigade!
Taxmen and women may not be human but they're mortal. They're only able to maintain the attitude because they think it's not going to happen to them. That's what kept the SS going for as long as it did. When you realize you're in the same boat, that's when you stop axing and chopping the hull and pick up an oar yourself.
Now I find it easy to be at one with God when I'm on the beach but after a phone call from a tax man and hear his or her voice ooze with the fat cat attitude that only the indexed pensioned rich government worker can have in a country of suffering private businessmen and citizens ,well, I loose it. Expletive. Expletive. Expletive. So much for my spirituality.
The face on my government is the tax department. All those politicians running around kissing babies are pretty labelling on a jar of arsenic. The tax department and the kinds of people who work there are the truest reflection of my government. Institutionalized Extortion at it's worst. Their attitude is what my taxes are paying for. It's the attitude that I loathe and fear. I'm afraid I'll lose it. I accept that I have to pay taxes and have paid more taxes than was due because I'm normal that way. I'm not like our government or the taxmen. I don't think like they do. I haven't focussed my life on how to get money out of people or how to 'bleed' people or how to 'insinuate' and 'demean'. It's the demanding, threatening, coercive, abusive, demeaning, judgemental, putrid, low life, contemptible, piggish, offensive, holier than thou, never make a mistake despite countless errors upon errors, superiority that offends me.
Yet, I'm humbled by the tax man. God sends him occasionally to me to test my peacefulness and serenity. I fail miserably. All my church going and spirituality and deep breathing fail when I hear that needling Toady Tone of voice. I see myself ripping out his or her entrails and feeding them to pigs. I know I should be praying for him or her and their family. I don't feel this angst when I am bit by a mosquito. Of course I can swat a mosquito and taxmen and taxwomen are above the law and live protected existences with the highest pay and priviledges that are rarely known to mere mortals. His or her brains are no differently wired from any other hive bug though.
He's laughing now at my and every other citizen whose struggling because of him or her. He gets bigger bonuses the more people he torments. If he could crack heads and shoot off knee caps he would. He/she does the emotional equivalent until he's once again allowed to do the real thing.
I know I should be praying for him. I know I should be. But I'm Tibet faced with China and the Dalai Lama and his people didn't fare any better. I'm not a saint. I'm a Canadian.
I know I'm not rich because of my poor decision to marry the women I have , to spend the money I did over and over again on women who blamed me for my inability to protect them from the taxman, my decision to remain in Canada forsaking all the highest paid work offered to me in the US, to buy "required" "essential" technology that became obsolescent before I opened the box, to not do an MBA or Law degree or go into banking or accounting, or grow drugs and live the rich and rewarded life of crime, or be a con artist, but instead to become a doctor and devoting my life to higher learning in my speciality rather than taking all the money management and financial courses my smart colleagues took instead of further study of medicine.
I know I am a failure. I am an utter failure. I am not a psychopath or sociopath. I'm not like Mulroney or Cretien or Harper or Campbell either. I lack some essential trait that causes me to be honest and truthful and worry about the poor and think that we're all in this together and no one is going to get out 'ahead" of another.
I know I've not managed my pittances because I paid for staff who stole and workers who didn't work and lawyers who failed and friends who never repaid the thousands they borrowed, and given thousands to charity and had accountants who failed to get the 'write offs' I found I was entitled to after the deadline closed. I've invested in causes that went bankrupt and bought countless things that didn't work and their warranties failed and paid for insurance that didn't come through, etc. I've been duped and lied to and mislead a thousand times. I was a fool to trust. If I'd been paranoid like the taxman who always treats me like himself and makes me so want to be a self fulfilling prophecy, perhaps I'd be a taxman myself.
I know I was more interested in all the wrong things, like sunsets, art and scienc e, good books, peace, god, and health care, education, love and family when I really ought to have been studying finance and thinking of ways to beat the taxman. According to the taxman all of us should have been thinking only about how to make money and avoid giving it to him so we could be rich like all those people who think like him. I know in his eyes I am only the unpaid tax of this month. In the eyes of my government too I increasingly feel they want me dead, since I'm older and less naive and likely to cost the health care system more. Euthanasia is a favourite government topic these days. They'd not euthanize tax men because there's no limit to their number and the good they do for government.
I know he sees me as puny,weak and silly, too. He only respects the truly rich and the criminals who have private armies, assassin squads and like our government officials, offshore accounts. He has no respect for integrity, good name, honesty, love, spirituality and things that I hold dear. The government encourages loyalty and frugality and service only to take advantage of the poor idealists who believe them. These realists despise the idealists but they legislate everyone else as cheap while claiming themselves, commoners that they are, as precious. I did ask what I could do for my country and I did it over and over again without pay. I am not rich or the super rich. I am a peasant like most Canadians.
But sitting cross legged I ask God to help me with gratitude. I am thankful that I have a job so that I can pay taxes. I ask God to teach me to love the tax man and accept that my government is unfolding as it should. The taxman is my spiritual guru. He or she reminds me that I am a killer dog who at any moment could crack and hunt down my enemies for edibles if I did not pray daily for grace. I really do want to stand upright and not drag my knuckles. The tax man is my helper in my pursuit of the holy just as China is Tibet's.
I don't condemn the terrorists or the road rage guys or the ones who go postal. I condemn their acts but now I even understand how guys in any military would want to go displace their anger from home and kill ragheads abroad. It used to be gooks and before that some other poor sod. An that poor young sod was doing the same thing, volunteer or conscript, dying young on the 'field of honour' than grow old on the 'field of dishonorable field of politics." If the government workers and tax departments did have honour the streets would be strewn with men and women who died on their swords when their corporate friends raped the national treasures and stole the future environment.
It's only really easy to be a saint when you're selling books about being a saint or you're getting paid to be a saint.
Spirituality is really a daily chore. Bite your tongue. Turn the other cheek. Be nice. They are not potty trained. Be nice. More bees to honey than shit. Don't read the newspaper. You can't handle hearing about another government corruption today. Exercise. Meditate. Spend more time in prayer. Know you can always just walk away. You're not indispensable. Hang up on the taxman and walk out the door and stand in a welfare line or take up a life of crime. Or muddle on. It's irrelevant to him. He doesn't care. Why should you. It's your life. This too will pass. Breath. Now practice being peaceful in the middle of the economic war. And when you get that right, grasshopper, we can get let out of kindergarden.
It's easy to love those who are like you. Even tax men care for their families and friends. But the test is loving the taxman and praying for him or her and knowing that Jesus taught that. The Bible is all about the taxman. Love them for they know not what they do.
would love to hear a Buffy St. Marie song, "Universal Taxman" or "Universal Beaurocrat."
Buddha would want us to love them too. I don't know about Mohammed because he seems a bit more down to earth, pragmatic and would jihad the tax department making the moslem religion more appealing some days despite the squabbling harems.
Gandhi would ask that we love the tax man. Martin Luther King said, it's going to be a hard day, so I must spend more time on my knees.
I for one must thank the taxman for teaching me humility, restraint and peace and mostly reminding me how much further I have to go to be a saint. The taxman is one of the greatest gurus of all really. I will only know enlightenment when I love the taxman. I will be a saint only when I love the tax man. What is the tax on saints these days, anyway?
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