Brad Wolf is the coordinator for Nonviolent Lancaster, PA, part of our Nonviolent Cities Project.

Each year Americans forfeit a sizable slice of their income to the United States Treasury to fund the government. Tax Day is dreaded. No one likes surrendering their hard-earned cash. But rather than a resigned shrug, Americans should look closely at what they are getting for their money when it comes to government services and policy.

In fiscal year 2023, the Pentagon received $858 billion for the preparation of war. This doesn’t include hidden costs for intelligence services, veterans' benefits, Homeland Security, or the Department of Energy which oversees the nation’s nuclear arsenal. All totaled, over $1 trillion a year is allotted for warmaking. By comparison, the 2023 budget for the US Department of State, this nation’s department tasked with making peace across the globe, was a relatively miniscule $63 billion.

One way to register resistance to this profligate spending on warmaking is that of renowned peace activist and Catholic priest Philip Berrigan. During the Vietnam war, Phil initiated the destruction of US military draft files in Baltimore and Catonsville, MD to save the lives of both Vietnamese and Americans, actions for which he received lengthy prison sentences.

These draft file actions by Phil initiated a new form of resistance to the Vietnam War since no copies were kept of the draft files. Dozens of similar actions followed at draft board offices across the country with hundreds of thousands of draft files destroyed, all stopping young men from being conscripted to kill or be killed.

In 1980, Phil initiated the Plowshares movement— which continues to this day— as he and others entered the General Electric Nuclear Weapons facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, pouring blood on weapons blueprints and symbolically hammering on the nosecones of missiles, “Beating swords into plowshares.” An Abrahamic metaphor (Jewish, Christian, Muslim) indeed, but a universal message. Since that first action, there have been more than 100 Plowshares actions around the world.

Phil strongly objected to the notion that US citizens should fund needless death and destruction abroad through their taxes, or possibly fund their own destruction by nuclear war. He repeated nonviolent actions time and again, serving a total of 11 years in prison to stop the slaughter of innocents and protest the use of US tax dollars for arms proliferation, nuclear warmaking, and endless wars of choice.

For US citizens, the well-known waste and fraud of the Pentagon should be one outrage. The Pentagon remains the only federal department to never pass a required federal audit. The Pentagon cannot account for 63 percent of the tax money it receives. That’s our money. Gone. Unaccounted. Lining the pockets of weapons manufacturers

But the more pressing concern with these war dollars is their use to initiate wars of choice, often against impoverished countries, because those countries have natural resources beneath the soil which the US seems to think belongs to them. The cruel joke is, “How dare they put their country over our oil.” And so, we take it. With extreme violence and death.

The US currently has soldiers in northern Syria where massive quantities of oil are extracted for western oil companies. The war in Iraq was for oil. We are building new bases in Somalia where oil fields have been found. These wars for corporate profit have gone on for more than a century. As decorated war hero Smedley Butler said in the 1930s about his many years in the US military, “I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. . . . Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints.”

Whether it be gold, fruit, rubber, or sugar in Latin America, oil in the Middle East, or rare earth minerals in Africa, the US taxpayer has long funded the corporate theft of natural resources from indigenous lands for the benefit of US corporations and their wealthy shareholders. Innocents in foreign lands die as a result, while US taxpayers struggle to pay mortgages, rent, healthcare bills, and food costs.

According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, the United States spent some $8 trillion in the last 23 years for the Wars on Terror. Six million people in foreign lands died because of those wars, most of them innocent civilians. Mothers and fathers and children.

As Phil said, “These blind leading the blind have done more than threaten us with doomsday scenarios. They have, with a devilish ingenuity, convinced us that we ought to pay, through taxes, for our own destruction.”

And so, as this Tax Day approaches, perhaps we can reflect on the life and work of Philip Berrigan and undertake our own ministry of risk for peace in whatever form that may take, to ease the suffering, to restore human dignity, to challenge our doomed policy of warmaking. In this way can we reconcile ourselves with justice and democracy. In this way can we save ourselves, our country, and perhaps the world.

Brad Wolf, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a lawyer and former prosecutor, director of Peace Action Network of Lancaster, PA, and co-coordinates the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal. His new book on the writings of Philip Berrigan is entitled “A Ministry of Risk.”