Every April 15, Americans perform a strange civic ritual: we gather our receipts, our worries, and our half-remembered deductions and try to make sense of what we owe to a government we’re not always sure we trust.

In 2026, that ritual feels especially charged.

Research shows Americans — especially Gen X — are more anxious about taxes than they’ve been in years.

At the same time, a few citizens are flirting with tax resistance, as if the IRS were a subscription service they could simply cancel.

Add to that a divided country, a new Middle East war, and a cultural landscape in which celebrities offer commentary on everything from geopolitics to moisturizer, and Tax Day becomes less a financial deadline and more a national mood ring.

This poem leans into a different possibility: that paying taxes might be understood not as extraction but as participation, a way of protecting what we hold dear.

It imagines government not as something we must endure, but as something we continually shape — freedom not from government, but freedom as the shared task of government.

Even in a noisy, anxious year, the small rituals of showing up still tether us to one another.

Tax Day 2026

Every April 15, we summon our wallets the way a medieval town summoned its goats,
reluctantly, with a little ceremony,
and the faint hope that someone else might volunteer theirs instead. But even the goats understood the village survived by what it shared.

Across the country,
Gen X is pacing the kitchen,
muttering about retirement accounts and the future nibbling at their dreams like mice in the pantry.

They are the most worried generation, which feels unfair, given everything they’ve already survived,
disco, dialup, the first three Star Wars reboots,
and children who now explain taxes to them using TikTok.

Still, beneath the muttering, there’s a quieter calculation:
what it takes to keep the lights on for everyone.

Meanwhile, a lawyer in Chicago announces she won’t pay her $8,800 this year, as if the IRS were a gym membership she can simply cancel.
Her post goes viral, and for a moment the nation imagines a tax strike conducted from the couch, in sweatpants, with the same moral fervor usually reserved for boycotting breakfast cereals or unfollowing a celebrity who disappointed us.

It’s a tempting fantasy — freedom as escape — though history keeps whispering that freedom rarely survives without upkeep.

Outside, the country is divided again,
a neat, even slice down the middle,
like a wedding cake no one wants to cut,
fondant peeling, bride and groom listing to one side, the whole thing leaning toward the exit. 

There’s a war somewhere, a protest somewhere else,
and a chorus of millionaire celebrities telling us what to
fear, love, buy and think,
as if democracy were a perfume line they’re launching next month, complete with a limitededition candle called Civic Engagement.

Still, we sit at our desks, typing numbers into little boxes,
each digit a tiny confession:
Yes, I lived another year.
Yes, I had medical expenses.
Yes, I tried my best.
Yes, I kept the receipt for something I can no longer identify.

And also — Yes, I want the fire trucks to come. Yes, I want the library open. Yes, I want the trails maintained and the water drinkable. Yes, I want the country to keep standing even when I’m tired of holding it up.

When the final total appears, that shimmering, accusatory sum,
we feel the familiar mix of dread and relief, like finishing a medical exam written by someone who knows all our secrets.

We click “Submit,”
sending our contribution into the shared reservoir we keep refilling, hoping it nourishes something worth passing on — mational parks, libraries, or perhaps a small corner of the national soul that still believes in us.

We close the laptop, step outside,
and the jacarandas are blooming again,
lavender confetti drifting across the sidewalk like nature’s reminder that participation is not the same as agreement, but it is a kind of tending.

We stand there longer than we meant to, receipt creased, overdocumented, watching the petals fall in their quiet, unbothered way. And it occurs to us — not as revelation, but as a small, persistent wondering — that maybe the country is less a machine we’re forced to fund and more a garden we keep inheriting, its blooms depending, in part, on us.

The trees keep blooming anyway.
The question, as always,
is what we’ll choose to tend next.

Santa Barbara resident Jay Casbon has devoted his professional journey to higher education, leadership and religious art history. He has served in distinguished academic roles, including provost at Oregon State University, graduate school dean at Lewis & Clark College, and a professor of education and counseling psychology. Jay is the author of several books, and most recently the co-author of Side by Side: The Sacred Art of Couples Aging with Wisdom & Love. He finds joy and clarity in writing poetry, restoring vintage watches, and collecting art that speaks to the soul. The opinions expressed are his own.