The Extra Pierogi: A Very Special Tax Day Edition of The Cheapskate Evangelist
There are two things that make me feel especially patriotic. One is standing in front of Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’m not exactly sure that it’s patriotism I feel, but if you are unprepared for the sheer hugeness of the painting you can’t help but feel sort of shocked and awed into giving your country a little bit of respeck.
The other thing is paying my taxes.
Now I’m an obnoxious liberal of such a rare variety that I often feel compelled to apologize to other liberal friends, who tune out immediately if I say the C-word. (No, not THAT C-word, wiseguy. The one that’s 50 miles across Lake Erie, and known for its Nanaimo bars, tragedy-stricken figure skaters, and terrible TV.) I like to think, though, that I’m not one of those awful, bloody humorless liberals obsessed with shrieking about subsidized corn and electric cars. If you arrived here by googling “obnoxious liberals who love paying taxes hate hate hate,” I bet we can find at least one dry patch of common ground: I cringed alongside you, my fellow patriotic American, when John Kerry clipped that turkey. OMG.
But I really do love paying my taxes, and to be frank, I would pay more taxes if I was asked. If I could just get on my soapbox for a moment — if only to see what it’s like to be a normal-sized person, for once — I’ve always felt that we should be conservative with our personal finances so that we can be liberal with our values. If you’ve ever gotten a text from me — especially in the middle of the night, or while I’m riding the bus — you know how much time I spend thinking up elaborate disaster scenarios. People who we don’t know, who we will never meet, but who in all probability are a lot like us, find themselves in all kinds of troubling circumstances for which no single person or factor is to blame. I believe there should be as much of a social safety net for those people as possible. I get queasy — real queasy — about the idea that anyone could go bankrupt from falling down and breaking their leg. Or that you could lose your entire life savings because of a benign brain tumor that your private health insurer would not cover. I would rather pay more in taxes so that no one would have to go through that. I say that not as a member of the Left Coast Intelligentsia but as a prickly Midwestern hausfrau whose gross household income last year was under $40k.
Indulge me for a moment and let me yammer about my family history. (If it makes you feel better, yammering about one’s family history is something librarians hate, so I’ll get my comeuppance.) My husband’s grandmother was born to Ukrainian immigrants in Eastern Pennsylvania. Her father, a coal miner, died in his early forties, leaving her mother alone to raise eleven children. And since these were the days before it was possible to score Octomom-like chat show appearances, they were poor. But as Grandma tells it, if an unexpected guest showed up at Sunday dinner, her mother always managed to find a couple extra pierogi.
In a nutshell, that’s the Cheapskate Evangelist philosophy of giving: be thrifty enough so you can always scrape up those extra pierogi. Am I trying to make you feel ashamed and guilty and terrible about your life choices? No. There are enough stories throughout world mythology and folklore to warn what happens to your everlasting soul if you get stingy with the wrong wayfaring stranger, so you don’t really need me to make you feel guilty. Just pick up a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and resign yourself to life as a toad.
The Creative Workforce Fellowship is a program of the Community Partnership for the Arts and Culture, made possible by the generous support of Cuyahoga County citizens through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.
I smile at the thought of the “C-word,” not tune you out. We also try to be thrifty to have something left for others. The past two years we have bought a share through an Ohio CSA for Shawn’s grandma who is struggling to live on Soc. Security while her two sons are both out of work (although one just got a job in Cleveland last month!)
1@Jen
2Oops, I meant half share – she couldn’t eat (nor could we afford) a full share.
Jim and I can’t even eat a full share! Once we ended up with five watermelons. But honestly, joining that CSA was a good example of how eating healthy does not have to be expensive. We spent $10 a week on more produce than we could possibly eat, whereas that same $10 would not have gone half as far at the supermarket. And before anyone says “yeah but you had the luxury of having time to go pick up your CSA share,” I’d like to put an image in your head of a very sweaty, grouchy person laden with fifteen pounds of produce in the middle of July trying to make a very ill-timed RTA transfer in order to get home before dark.
(That person was me.)
I always hear about Americans being generous, and so I puzzle at why a systematic (dare I say) redistribution of wealth is so anathema to us. I read an interesting book a few months ago called The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. The author talks about how we almost never encounter people who are unlike us anymore, because we’ve segregated ourselves into little communities with other people with beliefs similar to our own. So I guess we’re more likely to want to give to people whose suffering we can imagine, rather than to THEM, i.e., the faceless masses who we’re quite sure are ruining The Greatest Country on Planet Earth!
3Also, good on you for helping Grandma. Grandmas are not to be trifled with!
4@Christine
5Move to Missouri and you’ll find A LOT of people “unlike” yourself. Even at the academic library here, there are only 2 people I feel “safe” talking too and neither are Missouri natives. That does sound like an interesting book though.
There were a lot of people unlike myself down the Jersey Shore. My library was really into the idea of diversity, so we had lots of diversity training workshops for the staff. I remember one where we went around the room and everyone had to talk about the first time they ever felt “different,” and I said: “when I moved here, because I’ve never been around so many Republicans before!”
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