Thoreau, a committed abolitionist and conductor on the Underground Railroad, denounced the American government’s tolerance of the institution of slavery, as well as “the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool.”

For abolitionists, slavery and the Mexican-American War were not unrelated; they worried the mammoth new territory acquired from Mexico at gunpoint — the current states of Texas, New Mexico, Utah, California and Nevada and parts of Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Wyoming — would spread slavery to the Pacific. (It’s demoralizing to realize how much of American political history is animated not by the question of should there be slavery but rather should there be slavery in the West.)

To protest, for six years Thoreau did not pay his taxes. He asks, “When I meet a government which says to me, ‘Your money or your life,’ why should I be in haste to give it my money?” And so he went to jail — for a single night. “For some one” — probably his aunt — “interfered, and paid that tax.”

Rereading “Civil Disobedience” annually, around tax time, is on the same to-do list as sending forms to my accountant and gathering the wadded-up receipts that suggest that my job is not writing but drinking tea in airports. Because the point of Thoreau’s admitted “harsh and stubborn and unconciliatory” rant is worth remembering at least once a year: Our money makes us complicit. You and I paid for the rope at Abu Ghraib just as our forebears footed the bill for Gen. Winfield Scott and Capt. Robert E. Lee to dock at Veracruz in 1847 and follow the trail blazed by Hernán Cortés to storm Mexico City because the guy in the White House really needed Utah.

For those of us more wishy-washy than Henry Thoreau — and that would be all of us — the bright side of our fiscal complicity is that we also get to chip in for things we believe in. Two words: Pell Grants. While I’m irked about shelling out for the president’s racist shenanigans on the Mexican border, I would happily fund boring ambassadors to South Korea, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Cuba, Egypt, the European Union, etc. Curious to hear about how Alexander Hamilton might not have single-handedly won the Battle of Yorktown? Head to Yorktown Battlefield National Park and catch one of Linda Williams’s taxpayer-supported ranger talks.