Conscience, Community, and Compromise

The last day of the year is, somehow, a good day to settle things. And so it was for us on December 31, 1993. On that day an out-of-court settlement was reached between the Valley Community Land Trust and Danny Franklin, a settlement that ended the nearly five-year campaign of non-cooperation with the U.S. government’s seizure and sale of our funky little farmhouse in the hills of Western Massachu-setts (see "We Shall Not Be Moved," May 1990).

At the time of the initial IRS seizure in March 1989, my wife, Betsy Corner, and I had been withholding our federal income taxes for 12 years, publicly redirecting the same amount of money to groups that serve the poor in our local community and assist victims of U.S. war-making abroad. The IRS had long since attached our bank account, garnisheed our wages, and placed a lien on our property—with little monetary success.

But seizing our home was more complicated than they thought, not only because it triggered an enormous outpouring of nonviolent resistance, but also because the land under and around our house was land we didn’t own. We’d been leasing it from our local community land trust. The trust had argued from the beginning that it was illegal for the government to transfer our leasehold to Danny Franklin, who paid $5,400 for it at an IRS auction in February 1992 and then took it over by force two months later.

The settlement called for the Franklin family to move out of the house and deed it and the land-lease over to the land trust in exchange for an undisclosed sum of money from the trust. It also provided for the dropping of the opposing civil suits that had been brought by the Franklins and the trust.

Although the media have tended to characterize the settlement as a defeat for the Franklins and thus a victory for "the tax resisters," we certainly do not see it as such. I myself regard the settlement as a reasonable and much-welcomed compromise in the best interests of all parties, including Betsy, Lillian (our 14-year-old daughter), and me, for our immediate neighbors, and for the hundreds of folks who participated in the 21-month occupation and vigil.

Some of our detractors have publicly decried the fact that Kehler and Corner "got their house back," but the truth is that we lost our house. Yes, others could buy it back from the trust for us, but for various reasons we’ve decided to explore other options, with help from our friends and supporters. We always said that we were willing to risk, and if necessary lose, our home in order not to pay for war. That’s what happened and we have no regrets.

IF THERE IS any victory on our parts, it has to do with the amazing and inspiring solidarity of the community that came together around the shared conviction that it is wrong to confiscate people’s homes in order to force them to pay for war. It has to do with our ability to keep on keeping on, as nonviolently as we knew how, in the face of all kinds of external threats and internal disagreements.

And, no doubt, it has to do with the way in which the action in Mass-achusetts—thanks to substantial media coverage and the ripple effect of countless one-to-one communications—stirred others to consider, or reconsider, the question of personal responsibility with respect to the destructive and immoral uses of our tax dollars.

Of course, the settlement between the land trust and the Franklins, though mutually acceptable, did not represent the ideal resolution for anyone—including, for sure, the Franklins. But that’s the nature of compromise. The question is always: What’s the alternative? In this case it was the near certainty of a long, dragged out, very expensive, and likely quite nasty litigation process, the final result of which was impossible to predict. Maybe this is, for us, yet another lesson in nonviolence: the lesson of when to compromise and when not to. That is, knowing when to hold on and when to let go; knowing what to hold on to and what to let go of.

A settlement isn’t the same as reconciliation, of course, and reconciliation in this case—not just with the Franklins but also with the many others in the larger community who opposed our actions—will take time, probably lots of time. Despite Western Mass-achusetts’ long history of rebellion, this is still a conservative neck of the woods in most respects. Every aspect of "the Colrain action," starting with our refusal to support the military with our tax dollars, touched raw nerves amongst some townspeople. We hope that with time and continued dialogue healing will come.

In the meantime, we’re very much continuing with a project that spun off the Colrain action a year ago, called Building Our Swords Into Plowshares. It started as a proposal to the Franklins in which we asked them to join us in building—with donations of labor, materials, and money from the community—several low-cost, high-quality homes for themselves and other families in need. They rejected the offer, but we decided to go ahead anyway. We felt that this kind of "constructive program," in the Gandhian sense, was an essential complement to resistance action in Colrain, and that it would provide an additional focus for public education regarding the need to reorder our national priorities.

At this point, two beautiful homes are half constructed, thanks to donations of all kinds—including thousands of dollars in redirected war taxes—from hundreds of local residents and farther-away supporters and dozens of area businesses. Indirectly, the Plowshares project has already done much to foster the kind of communication and reconciliation that is needed.