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TAXING THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLE

OFF THEIR LAND

By Carroll Cox

Among the forgotten people on the land are those who like to grow their own vegetables' the home gardening folks whose combined output exceeds the total of all American commercial farming. They are the ones who own a few head of livestock or a flock of chickens to supply milk or eggs for their kitchen, and fertilizer for their gardens. These folks regard the frequent restless roaming of the multitudes through shopping malls as the trivial pursuit of a shallow and spoiled nation, and shop only for the basic necessities. These forgotten ones are they who listen to the breezes, the songs of birds, the cackle of hens and the contented lowing of a cow in place of sirens and boom boxes. They consider it good. Very good. My mother, almost eighty years old, was washing the breakfast dishes one day as she watched her resident raven couple and their current year's crop of four offspring squawk and crow-hop happily around the pond.

"They're crazy and misguided," she murmured softly.

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

"Those people who say humans don't belong in nature. When we came here there was nothing but sand and junipers. No birds, no lizards, no wildlife of any kind. It worried me. Now we have dozens of varieties of birds, the garden is full of lizards and butterflies, the woodpiles are alive with chipmunks and rabbits, the pond is a rest stop for antelope and a fishing destination for the Sandhill crane that drops in for a few days every year."

I've thought about the truth of Mom's comments for the last several weeks. We live on the arid high plains of Arizona where there is no natural water in a twenty mile radius. Much of the Southwest is like that. I thought of the thousands of farmers and ranchers and mini-homesteaders who provide precious water and green vegetation for countless wild creatures, as well as for themselves and their domestic animals, and whose pleasures in life consist of growing healthy plants or animals and gazing at a brilliant, unobstructed field of stars and feeling the crisp, fresh air that accompanies the dawn of a new day in the country.

This is the lifestyle that numerous Americans across the nation prefer, choosing tranquility over the blaring, mind-numbing sounds of the city, self-reliance over instant convenience, and austerity over addictive consumption. There are millions of anonymous people like the upper New York state lady whose only claim to fame was her letter in Countryside magazine. In the 1980s she was alone, approaching middle-age and sought a more noble and self-reliant lifestyle than that of the typical urban dweller who is utterly dependent upon a multitude of 'systems' for all the essentials of daily life. She managed to purchase a few rural acres and established her home in an elderly travel trailer minus any of the amenities the majority of Americans take for granted. The property taxes were only $360. She could afford that.

With her own hands, over the years she built a modest home and outbuildings and a pond. She was set for life in an environment that pleased her. She was grateful to live in modern America, where the Supreme Court of the land had established in the law "a woman's right to choose." Her choice was an independent lifestyle in a rural setting. She raised, she canned, she produced for herself and neighbors, and was happy. She had little money but considered herself rich in satisfaction of the body and soul, with no need for government programs, women's lobbying groups or legislated special privileges and entitlements.

Until slowly, stealthily her property taxes rose to $3,500 and her dream became an unaffordable nightmare.

I've seen this happen time after time. Families who did without much so mothers could stay home on their few acres, occupying their children with useful pastimes.

Elderly couples who planned and saved and dreamed of spending their retirement years in the midst of their own vineyard or orchard.

While farmers and ranchers whose livelihoods depend upon the land get plenty of attention, almost all negative and destructive, these many small people from New York to California who love the land and nature and producing things don't qualify for public discourse. Their 'right' to mind their own business and do something useful are all but forgotten in the clamor over gay rights and black rights and women's rights. Modest income people who want to be as independent as possible on their own few acres don't qualify for low tax agricultural exemptions. They fall in the cracks in much the same way as the far more publicized working poor of the cities who can't afford a house but don't qualify for low income housing.

The excuse is always the same: "Well, gee, we can't help it if the assessed valuation went up because all these other people are moving in."

But they can help it! At the very least they can freeze property taxes (all of them) for the length of ownership, compensating if they must when the property is sold. This measure would promote more stability (which is notably lacking in America today). Surely a little government belt-tightening is preferable to taxing people off their land.

Taxing great numbers of silent and forgotten people out of their homes and off their land is a crime against the American dream, a deadly assault on the virtues of thrift and planning and productiveness.

Those attributes were valued in our country once upon a time.

Not any more. We live in a culture that promotes consolidated dependency. Consolidation of businesses, banks food distributors, utilities and governments to control the lifelines for people consolidated in cities, apartments, condominiums and tiny squares of land. Old folks are supposed to while away their time at golf courses and casinos or get a job at Wal-Mart if they can't pay their property taxes on the home they bought thirty years ago. Families are expected to live in their consolidated boxes and work two jobs so they can give their little darlings every thing in the world they need and much that they don't. Those who expect children to learn usefulness and responsibility on a property are considered odd, or even child abusers.

The worst crime in the warped minds of what passes for thought leaders today is that of people actually doing something productive on the land! Nature must be protected from man the intruder, they say, even as they consume the products of nature with a hunger and greed unparalled in history.

But man is a part of nature. The key part, with an ability to do good equaled only by his potential for evil. And I believe the forces that have been working too long to remove man from vast areas of land, the myth perpetuated that somehow he is alien to nature is intrinsically evil, though my mother kindly called it only "misguided." The movement is becoming dangerously self-fulfilling, in that today most humans are so far removed from nature, so ignorant of its workings that they are indeed aliens!

Which makes the few of us whose spirits crave the work of the earth even more valuable, for within us resides the affinity with nature that has sustained mankind through the ages. In our dwindling hands we hold the key to the future and the fate of all mankind. In an old book called The Turn of Destiny, Robert Cheswick wrote "That which, among the ethics of men and the government of men, is not man-centered, is evil.....Once any scientist, or layman, or politician, or government advances any concept unconcerned with (man's) values, society is in danger. Man is not an abstract, his emotions, his spirit, his virtues and his vices are not abstracts, and are treated so only to his peril."

We who are called to the land, whose 'spirits' and 'emotions' are bound to it, are not abstracts. We have legitimate values. We build productive and supportive cultures of community. While some chosen 'values' and 'cultures' of today are deified, ours is scorned, as if at the bottom of the cutural food chain.

We can always hope that someday the most 'educated' society the world has ever known will realize that we are the food chain!

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