A word about charity.

In 1982 I received a fund-raising phone call from the Sierra Club. Previously, callers would ask me for $25, but this time I was asked for $2500 to help the club urgently hire a high-priced Washington, DC, lobbyist. I felt at the time that how Americans "promote the general welfare" had somehow changed without my noticing into something other than what the Preamble to our Constitution had seemed always to have stated, or at least into something other than the idea of shared responsibility that Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal had carved into the American cultural landscape.

Thatcher-Reagan, neoliberal capitalism, which had gained ascendancy by 1979, had succeeded in turning this idea of sharing on its head, and individual responsibility, in the form of a deluge of pleas for urgent contributions, began pouring into my mailbox from dozens, if not hundreds -- if not thousands -- of charities every day. The argument, of course, is that taxing the haves to give ostensibly undeserved handouts to the have-nots is inherently wasteful and unfair.

But we continue to be taxed, and our taxes are used variously to subsidize giant corporations who produce poison-laden, unhealthy food and destroy the soil; and giant corporations who off-shore jobs and hire essentially slave labor abroad; and giant corporations who receive half a trillion dollars per year -- more almost than the military budgets of the entire rest of the world combined -- in "defense" spending. Our taxes subsidize giant oil corporations, the acquisition of whose product destabilizes and pollutes whole regions of the globe, and the use of which is destroying our planet's ability to sustain human life as we know it.

On my way into a local grocery store today I was greeted by three of the cutest, sweetest little girls and one of their mothers, a lovely woman, who were selling nuts to raise funds. At the checkout, the cashier essentially demanded that I contribute $10 to a Thanksgiving food bank. When I got home, a Dakotan Indian tribe I had given $100 during the dot.com boom, when I was employed, called me with an urgent request for money for food for the winter. Yesterday a charity in Appalachia I had also contributed to rather generously when I was employed called with an urgent request. Urgent requests for money to support eye surgery in the developing world, books for the blind, disabled veterans, toys for poor kids, come to me almost every day.

I don't mind paying taxes. In fact, I quite enjoy it, because for me it represents my acceptance of my individual responsibility to contribute to the benefits I enjoy because I am a member of the society to which I belong. But I don't like what my taxes are spent on, and I don't like having to say no, as a matter of my own personal financial capability, to so many worthy causes.