Cultural diversity is the Federally-mandated process by which people with no qualifications other than apocryphal tales of atrocities levied against their presumed ancestors Officially displace persons with demonstrable abilities, lest the educational or industrial milieu become efficient and productive. Washington wants the whole country to work as do its own corridors of power, privilege, pork, and hypocrisy. That the rest of America does not get to print greenbacks to make up the difference is a moot point.
Each 15 April Caesar seizes what can be grasped by law; seized by guile and ambiguity; or wrested by fear, intimidation, and outright terrorism. The IRS mocks Lady Godiva's nude horseback ride protest of her husband's abusive taxation in the year 1040. Were you to submit the required IRS forms and payments accompanied by a polite letter of demurrage, you would be liable to Federal arrest, fine, and imprisonment. The IRS would attend to you personally and expeditiously through their own private constabulary and court systems (no juries) plus a prophylactic audit down to your toenails. Murder, rape, arson, and even civil insurrection occupy lesser priorities among Federal prosecutors because they do not engender revenue enhancement.
Celebrations of ethnic diversity among People's of Color historically exploited by patriarchal White Protestant European oppressors is Officially subsidized lest the dark hordes vote for Republicans and the realization of earned private wealth. As the Catholic Church trades parishioners' proximate squalor and full collection plates for afterlife promises, so the ruling government optimistically leases the votes of its victims through Welfare for the next election. This Official subsidy of what would be social and legal suicide in a productive citizen engenders a certain stretch to the envelope of tax protest. The One True Church never forgave Hindus for inventing the Devil-spawned cipher (and trigonometry, which begat deep sea navigation and the New World). God does His blessed arithmetic in numerals, Roman numerals.
It would be a simple matter, as a matter of personal minority rights, to submit Form 1040 as the real God intended - decorated with I (one), V (five), X (ten), L (fifty), C (one hundred), D (five hundred), M (one thousand) concatenated in ritually and pecuniarily proper ways - courtesy of your computer. IRS code long ago exceeded the heft of the Bible in textual bulk and ambiguity, and certainly in the size of the tithe from the get go. Church and State are separate. You may not be forced to violate your God, even if it means not saluting the flag or not admitting to military conscription. The ACLU will assuredly support you in your quest to do Form 1040 in blessed numerals.
(And if not, there are other and broader avenues available through a bit of inspired computer hacking, to follow.)
The opportunity to retrain an army of part-time (no benefits or pension) IRS minimum wage workers to disentangle the complexities of Roman numerals heralds a new age of enhanced Federal employment. Uncle Sam has always been big on spending vast sums of money to train large numbers of people to no useful end. Consider the armed forces, Federal procurement procedures, and Project Head Start; the Peace Core, CETA, HUD, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
58% of all 2008 Federal tax returns were filed electronically. The protocols are standardized, without strong (any) encryption protection, and limited to just a few phone numbers for tele-input. Imagine a small but expert clique of viruses wandering the electronic highways and byways of our great nation, listening for raw data squeals headed toward IRS processing centers. How simple it would be to on the fly minutely alter 20 million tax returns to conform to God's will. Who could object to divine intervention?
Why stop with Roman numerals? Arabic does not avail itself of Arabic numerals. We cannot in good conscience require celebrants of Muslim diversity to compromise their beliefs any more than we could require "citizens" to vote ballots printed in English rather than Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese... It would be wrong.
Education 2010 is upon us, wherein the process of evolving personal empowerment and self-esteem is more important than obtaining a rigid, closed-minded answer. How delicious Form 1040 will be when 2+2=5 for sufficiently large values of 2. We can rest assured that 2+2 will NEVER equal 3 for any values of 2, no matter how small. IRS toleration has its limits above and beyond any hallucination of personal rights.
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