Death and Taxes, Not Necessarily in That Order

"April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land . . ." --T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

I was looking up the quotation above in my copy of The Waste Land and saw that I had written a note in the margin about Eliot having turned Chaucer's pilgrim gaiety on its head with these opening lines. Chaucer's spring fever is Eliot's elegy: clearly, these are two different views of spring. Is one more apt than the other? It probably depends on who you ask, or, maybe, when you ask. I don't think the sentiments really contradict each another.

Almost all of us have felt the surge of renewed energy that arrives with spring. Likewise, most of us have known times when we felt out of step with this mood, for one reason or another . . . a personal tragedy or an illness, perhaps. And regardless of anything else that might be happening, April is tax season, not really the highlight of anyone's year. It always seems like a shame to be preoccupied with 1099s and schedule Cs just when the weather's finally getting nice, but, in the wisdom of the Federal government, it has been so ordained that we must suffer (so you know it must be right).

Somehow, I hadn't really paid much attention before to the fact that April 15 is the date of Abraham Lincoln's death. Had you? Maybe it's because April 15 is overwhelmingly associated now with the Internal Revenue Service, e-filing, and tax forms, but it seems a shame that these things so far overshadow such a major tragedy in our history. I hadn't noticed much being made of the anniversary in the past, but this year, as you've heard, is the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's death, and so it has come to the forefront.

To me, collecting taxes is an odd way to honor President Lincoln, but apparently the date was appointed in the 1950s to give taxpayers more financial leeway (the filing deadline used to be March 15). I'm wondering now how much thought went into the selection of the date other than its being conveniently located an exact month later than the previous deadline. Did no one think of Lincoln, did it not seem to matter, or was the need to pick a date already associated with taxes (and thus easy to remember) the most pressing concern? Many people probably make little of the coincidence, but looked at from a symbolic viewpoint, it almost feels like a "papering over" of a painful moment from the past. (Don't tell me these things don't happen--they do.)

Of course, we now have a more recent tragedy associated with April 15, that of the Boston Marathon bombing. I was out walking the other day, a lovely, mild evening on which the local park was filled with young people dressed for prom night, the sparkling colors of their clothes competing with the tulips and blossoming trees for brilliance. As this exuberant crowd of students, parents, and friends milled around, the Boston tragedy came into my mind. I agree, it's sad that such a festive evening turned my thoughts toward something so tragic, but there it is: the mood near the finish line in Boston that day must have been similarly exuberant.

Loss is no respecter of seasons. Personally, I've lived through tornadoes, a fire (which actually occurred on April 15 some years ago), the death of a friend, and traffic accidents, all occurring in or near early April. Some of these events affected me greatly, and some very little in the long run, but one thing I do know is how surreal the beauty of the season seems under circumstances of loss, how disconnected one can feel from the flow of things. I've come through most of these events in no way diminished (except for losing the friend). I love spring, but I can't help but think of the people whose lives were interrupted that day in Boston and wonder how they're coping.

There's no bringing back Martin Richard, Krystle Campbell, Lu Lingzi, or Sean Collier, no undoing the devastating injuries suffered by the survivors. It's hard to take in the scope of what occurred until you imagine it happening to someone you love, in which case it comes into focus pretty quickly. I look at the Kentucky springtime unfolding all around me and wonder how long it will be before the survivors can look with anything but grief at the beauty of a Boston spring.

Death and taxes. Death and new life. Tragedies occur, and somehow life moves on. Is there a point to this post? Well, yes, there is. I keep thinking of smiling 8-year-old Martin Richard, holding up his sign, expressing his wish that people would stop killing each other. I often think, when I read arguments and counter-arguments for fighting terrorism with more war, that it's amazing the human race has come as far as it has. Why wouldn't you look for those who support terrorism, financially or otherwise, and charge them in a court of law? Isn't it more salutary to treat acts of terrorism as crimes than to start wars that seem untenable from the outset and may do little to address ultimate causes? We go around in circles, never getting to the bottom of things. Our government makes a show of being tough on terror but merely perpetuates it (and for this, we pay taxes).

Martin Richard will never see it, but for his sake, I'm making a plea that we do some soul-searching as a society and try to look more deeply into the root causes of terrorism. This will probably hurt. I believe that many people who consider themselves completely opposed to terrorism actually support it by trusting the government to fight it on their behalf, a government that is not only dysfunctional but also not opposed to doing away with constitutional rights in its quest to--it tells us--make the world safer. The government doesn't always have a vested interest in telling the public the truth about things--far from it. But the public always has a duty to insist on it.