Your PC, supportive IRS at work
Bookworm on Nov 20 2010 at 9:14 am | Filed under: Taxes
Many of us view the IRS with a certain amount of suspicion. Being fair-minded people, we know that all societies need some mechanism to collect revenue to pay for basic government services (with the fault lying with Congress if those revenue demands are excessive). We also know that our family and friends may work for it, and that they do so in an honorable capacity.
Nevertheless, there’s no getting past the fact that the IRS is a huge government bureaucracy that can, and will, destroy you if you cross it. It’s also unnerving that the current Congress is using the IRS, not just as a collection agency, but as a cudgel to force citizens to comply with coercive government policies that violate fundamental constitutional rights.
Given the IRS’s vast power, which Congress has recently put to a nefarious use, will it comfort you at all to know that the IRS has a touchie-feelie side? How else to explain this email, which circulated to large numbers of IRS employees, before ultimately making its way to my inbox.
You can draw your own conclusions about what’s happening within the IRS. I’ll just say that I view with suspicion any email that begins with a bathetic quotation from the execrable Jimmy Carter:
Sent: Friday, November 19, 2010 9:38 AM
To: ******
Subject: Creating a beautiful mosaicWe have become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams. – Jimmy Carter
I am constantly amazed by the contribution so many of you make to the IRS, your co-workers, and your communities through your memberships in any of more than a dozen IRS employee groups.
From the oldest organization, the Association for the Improvement of Minorities in the IRS, founded in 1969, to the newest group formed just this year, the Interactive Spiritual Partners for Internal Revenue Employees – these clubs work to fulfill significant missions. They typically serve their members and communities by supporting equal opportunities for all, while alerting leaders to trends and new issues. Most employee organizations meet regularly, raise funds to help fulfill their organization’s mission and assist within the community. Many groups offer scholarships and educate their members through local and national conferences, e-mail and social media.
***** and I thank all of you who improve your communities and help make the IRS the best place to work. You not only help others, you also learn new skills and meet people who can support you in your career. ***** and I know the value of employee groups because we often attend the national conferences and see the “magic” happen firsthand.I encourage you to visit the Employee Organizations Web page. Ask questions, attend a meeting and join one – or more – groups. Be assured you can join any of them. Your political, ethnic or religious background is unimportant to these groups as long as you support their shared mission – to make the IRS employee “mosaic” even more beautiful to behold.
Cross-posted at Right Wing News
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15 Responses to “Your PC, supportive IRS at work”
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Book, every company puts some effort into supporting employee groups. I find them all relatively innocuous. If a company wants to put up some of its money to support internal groups, fine.
But I suspect there is a problem here! I’d love to see some of those IRS employees start a Tea Party organization! Or a “Let’s Discuss Today’s Rush Limbaugh’s Radio Program” group!
Somehow, I think we might find that the smarmy “we love you and your equal-opportunity efforts, and we tolerate everyone!” tone of that email might switch into overt hostility. Because some employee groups are more equal than others, you know.
It ‘creeped me out’ – are you sure this email originated in America?
I’d swear it was translated from a PRC memorandum.
[...] Your PC, supportive IRS at work [...]
“If it smells funny, don’t eat it.”
An administration that views all people as members of competing groups and classes, and government as a redistributive fight over which group gets how much, wants its employees to self-identify which groups they fall into? Might be a straight deal, and a number of straight shooters in the IRS hierarchy may look at it that way. But do they all? And if you worked for the IRS, would you want to bet your career on it?
Just say you are Kenyan. They won’t touch you then.
We have become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic.
The trouble with this metaphor is that it assumes that you’re just sticking any old objects together and it works, when in fact a mosaic consists of lots of tiles of different colors and sizes. A mosaic can also include pieces of glass or stones or other materials, but they all have to respond the same to the adhesive and mortar and grout that holds them in place.
If you include a piece of yarn or cloth or wood in a mosaic, that material will eventually weather away, leaving a hole. The mosaic must have the sticky, hardening substance to keep the pattern stable, or you don’t have a mosaic at all but rather a pile colorful rubble that can be dispersed and destroyed.
So if the U.S. is a mosaic, fine, but let’s acknowledge that there’s mortar involved (classical liberal values, the Constitution, etc.) and from there we’re ecstatically happy to include tiles of various colors and sizes, and marbles and stones and anything else that is able to stick in the mortar and weather the exposure.
dicentra
Nicely artistically/metaphorically put.
dicentra says in #6,
> The mosaic must have the sticky, hardening substance to keep the pattern stable, or you don’t have a mosaic at all but rather a pile colorful rubble that can be dispersed and destroyed.
Awesome! What a brilliant destruction of a worthless metaphor.
Best of all, it highlights how liberals, due to the nature of their philosophy, are obsessed with superficial appearance, neglecting and ignoring the need for strength in the fundamental underlying infrastructure. They don’t think about what holds things together, what BINDS them and BONDS them, at all.
I love dicentra’s comment for its clarity and insight. I’m a grinning fool right now.
That is a brilliant comment, dicentra and I think a mosiac of individual pieces, held together by American cement was the way we were before multiculturalism got its hooks in. My great-grandparents were enormously proud of being German. They liked German food, German music and the German language, but they were even more proud of being Americans. They worked hard to learn the language, to become citizens and to contribute to the country they loved. They would have been insulted to have been catered to and to have special exemptions for them. The very idea of a German language ballot would have set my great grandfather off.
Dicentra, so your point is that the Left doesn’t understand the difference between a picture they paint in their head that looks like a mosaic and an actual mosaic that takes real hand work to make? heh]
Doesn’t that imply Leftists have their heads up in the clouds and not down on earth? Maybe they need to stop growing those Ivy Towers or high thrones in DC.
Here’s what happens when your mosaic includes pieces that don’t adhere to your adhesive: Swedish doctor assaulted for being a man.
Ellen…German-Americans: Many of the American troops who fought against Germany during WWII were themselves of German descent. (This category includes General Eisenhower.) In today’s political/social environment, the “multiculturalism” meme inculcated by academics and their media amplifiers would have weakened their attachment to the U.S. to the point we would have seen widespread disaffection, and pro-Nazi organizations such as the Bund would have become enormously more dangerous.
Dicentra: a brilliant take on a very annoying metaphor.
David Foster: Loved that article because it so carefully avoids mentioing the ethnicity of the family that was so outraged that a man might look at their woman’s private parts. Did you read the comments? It didn’t take long for someone to speculate “Muslim or Roma?” and then, in the blink of an eye, the Thought Police showed up and started screaming about Islamophobia and how the laws against that sort of speech ought to be as strict as those against anti-Semitism. Of course, by all reports, the laws against anti-Semitism aren’t enforced much in Sweden, although I’m sure laws against “Islamophobia” would be. What sad silly people.
And of course I forgot my main point: my sister works for the IRS. She’s a good person but she works for an evil organization. When I have remarked on this, which I haven’t in years, she always said, “Congress writes the laws. If you don’t like what the IRS does, complain to Congress.” Of course we all know that’s not exactly true as Congress constantly delegates its legislative power to executive branch agencies and lets them set the rules, to everyone’s dismay.
Furthermore, Sister’s defense of Congress making the rules has always smelled a little bit like “just following orders.” Seems to me that if you work for an organization that is doing things that are wrong, you really ought to find other work if you want to consider your self a good person.
And finally, my sister is now going to retire at the ripe old age of 57 and we get to support her for probably another 30 years (women in our family live nearly forever).
As I view it, it is pointless getting emotional over family members being part of an organization like the Un or the State Department that gets attacked all the time. People often see this as reflecting badly upon their extended family because they know people who have worked in State Department. Thus the State Department can’t be bad or deserving of such attacks or this implies my “X” relative is bad and deserving of such attacks.
The point really is that the sin and sinner aren’t the same. Nor is it that a person working for the State Department bears full responsibility for the evils of the State Department. It is more accurate to say that because your relative works for the IRS or State Department, that they are just a cog and cannot be expected to control company policy. Whether a cult is bad or not, does not reflect upon what individuals in the cult deserve. But nor does the fact that there are good people in bad organizations, make the organizations somehow better or good. It’s because of the simple fact that unless your family members have the power to change the organization, they can’t be expected to do anything about the State Department’s collusion with anti-Americans and enemies of America like the Saudis. But nor are they entirely unrelated to such doings, since their boss is the State Department.
For most people, when they find out that a cult is bad they will try to get their family members to quit. But often that doesn’t work because the cult seems like the safer and better bet to those in it than not.
The deal with the government agencies is that there is a reliable track record that you can get lots of money and benefits if you stay in. If this ends up with somebody else getting crucified, well, it’s not like that ever stopped any organization from getting work done. Humans don’t really care about abstract “others” that they know nothing about. Just a fact.