Page:The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.djvu/101

CHAPTER 6. LIFE AT HARD LABOR—THE HOPI 88 #Courage is the most important virtue, for, as Johnson said to Boswell, if you do not have it you cannot practice the other virtues.
 * 1) Voluntary Poverty, the fundamental means of the Catholic Worker and Tolstoy, keeps the radical from becoming bourgeois and selling out.
 * 2) Pacifism and the Sermon on the Mount I had learned in solitary and they provided a basis for a worthwhile personal life and for a philosophy upon which to meet all other social problems.
 * 3) Anarchism is the negative side, but necessary to keep one from the treadmill of politics.
 * 4) Decentralization is needed, of course, so that the above principles might work to best advantage.
 * 5) Vegetarianism, which includes no drinking, smoking, gambling or medicine, is necessary to live healthily and to be efficient; otherwise with one hand you are pulling one way and with the other hand you are pulling the other way. Keep well.
 * 6) Reincarnation seems a more reasonable theory than the heaven and hell of orthodoxy, although it may be just a deferred heaven that we have to earn.

A while before this I had been called to the tax office and told that I should pay something down on my bill. I replied that I did not intend to pay anything, as per my notice to them. The tax man was a Catholic veteran whowhom [sic] thought I was a Communist. He said that I would have to go to jail if I did not pay. I told him that I had been there before and was willing to go again.

"Do you think you are right and every one else is wrong?" he asked. "Just about!" was my quick reply. "How could that be?" he queried. "I already have figured it out; it is up to you to figure it out," I replied. "What kind of a country would we have if everyone thought like you?" he asked. "We would have a fine country; no government; no war; no tax man; no police; everyone living according to Christ and the Sermon on the Mount!" was my answer. At this he became angry and said "If you don't like this country why don't you go back to Russia?" "I like this country; it is my country; I want to stay here and fight you fellows who are trying to spoil it," I replied quickly.

At that time I was working for the big produce company so the tax man said he would garnishee $10 of my wages each week to pay for my taxes due. I told him I had quit my job. He wanted to know when, and I told him "just now" in order that he could not garnishee my wages. He wanted to know where I would work tomorrow and I told him that I did not know yet; that God would see that I got work. When I first came to Phoenix I received a letter which had been written to me in Albuquerque from an atheist who had bought a