Independently Speaking By Brent Olson

Obvious

There are some ideas you’d think would be too simple to screw up, too clear for any misunderstanding. But that is not true. It’s not at all true.

One of the first times that notion dawned on me, I was part of a conversation where people, other farmers, were complaining about fuel taxes. Here’s the thing. The diesel fuel used on a farm, for tractors and other equipment, is red in color. Dye is added to the usually clear fuel to easily distinguish it from the stuff used in trucks that go down the road, which has around 30 cents in tax added, per gallon. That money is supposed to be used to pay for maintenance and improvement of roads. 

Fuel taxes have never bothered me, because they seem so fair. The more you use the roads and the heavier the vehicles are that you drive on the roads, the more you pay to fix the roads. Now, if you get caught using off-road diesel in an on-road vehicle, it’s kind of a thing. The last time I checked, the penalty was $10.00 per gallon, and the authorities can even confiscate your rig. Still, saving $0.30 per gallon times hundreds of gallons can be a temptation. 

I’m not a huge fan of taxes, but we can’t do without them. Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, in 1904, “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.” If you want to argue about who should pay taxes and what the money should be used for, that’s a fair discussion that anyone in any country can have, but I always thought the need for taxes was obvious.

To make a long story a little bit shorter, a guy was explaining how he’d made a little thing that fit down inside his fuel tank to hold clear diesel, so if he was stopped and checked, he’d get away with it. I offered up my opinion that as taxes go, fuel taxes are relatively fair, and the guy jumped all over me, saying, “I pay enough taxes already!”

Well, okay. I didn’t think that was the discussion we were having. I changed the subject. I’m not going to report him, but I’m not going to feel bad for him if his name shows up in a court report. 

That discussion happened years ago, but I still remember how shocked I was, because I’d been operating under the assumption that it was a principle everyone agreed on, that you should pay for what you use.

This memory popped into my head when I read an opinion piece that stated it’s our Christian duty to obey the authorities and get out of the way of the ICE operation in Minnesota.

I was shocked, because one of the always appealing things to me about being a Christian was the amount of time we’ve spent not obeying authority. Abolishing slavery, feeding the poor, civil rights…there’s a pretty long list of Christians being a pain in the neck toward authority.

Now, the Bible is over 700,000 words long. Experts say it was written by around 40 people, over the course of 1,500 years. There are all sorts of contradictions, along with plenty of passages about obeying the folks in charge. On the other hand, a couple decades ago a friend told me she was a “Red Letter” Christian, meaning she took most of her guidance from the actual teachings of Jesus, which are printed in red letters in some Bibles. That trims the number of most important words to around 30,000, and those words show some disrespect toward doing things the way they’ve always been done, along with quite a bit of, “…love thy neighbor as thyself.” I am absolutely not a Biblical scholar, but I have read all 30,000 of those red letters words, many times, and I can remember no support for beating foreigners senseless, ripping children out of schools, and locking them in crowded, filthy facilities before shipping them off to countries some of them barely remember or had never set foot in.

There’s a lot, a lot, wrong about our immigration policies, going back 500 years or so, a lot to argue and disagree about. But I thought refusing to go along with pointless governmental brutality was something we could all agree on, particularly those of us who call ourselves Christians.

I guess I was wrong.

Copyright 2026 Brent Olson