I’ve received many blessings from my mother’s native Canada, as well as from the U.S., my father’s place of origin. It would be impossible to tally the resources I’ve enjoyed: cultural, linguistic, geographical, educational, economic, medical, and more. Each of these nations has much to recommend it, and I’m proud to claim both places as home.

Yet it’s easy to compile sordid laundry lists for each country: Both have engaged in political actions resulting in greater wealth at the expense of less powerful peoples. I was born around the time of U.S. military incursions in southeast Asia and grew up thinking that the U.S. was a bully, while Canada was the nicer cousin. I later learned, however, that Canada has also pursued violent exploits within and outside of its borders.

I live with cognitive dissonances: I’m grateful for what I have, but am aware that people in other lands often unwillingly foot the bill.

These days, many people rightly decry genocidal actions of the Israeli government. I condemn what’s happening in Gaza while also acknowledging the staggering levels of violence and oppression that make my standard of living possible.

My biological parents, Céline and Bruce, raised my siblings and me to live simply so others may simply live. My second set of parents, Wally and Juanita — whom I met right when I was feeling orphaned — magnified those lessons. Yet each of my parents emphasized that, by living where we do, we’re inevitably involved in systems with which we have significant philosophical differences. None of us has clean hands.

Humans continue to slaughter each other in the name of nationalism, land acquisition, religious exceptionalism, or other rationales. I can’t do anything substantive about Benjamin Netanyahu or Vladimir Putin; those fellows and many others like them are off and running, drunk on power, blind to reason. Maybe it’s human nature, or more likely a result of societies gone off the rails, including mine. Both of mine.

All I can do is make sense of my life. This year, I celebrate 40 years as a tax resister, a choice I conceived of at age 14 and put into action at age 20. I am not a tax evader: I’ve never earned above taxable income, and haven’t cheated the government of a dime. I opt to live low on the chain because I know that — as an American citizen with fair skin and a smidgen of post-secondary education — the higher I rise, the lower someone else inevitably sinks.

I’m often asked how I live without owning my own home or having a mobile telephone. Other questions concern my lack of benefits, paid vacation time, or other professional advantages. Do I ever feel scared? Occasionally. More often, though, I’m aware that my station in life — while modest compared with some Americans and Canadians — is a bonanza when compared to how things are going for people in Gaza, other parts of the Middle East, Ukraine, Sudan, Haiti, Ethiopia, Myanmar, and dozens of other places, including Greenfield, Chicopee, and Orange.

Sometimes, when people ask me questions, they get twitchy because they think I’ll ask them to mimic my choices. I do not. Lifestyle choices are intensely personal, and I don’t presume to dictate anyone else’s, just as I expect to be able to make my own.

I do my best to honor the lessons bestowed on me by my first father, an artist from Brooklyn, and my first mother, a Québecois farm girl … as well as my second father, grandson of enslaved peoples, and my second mother, whose parents left Georgia as part of the Great Migration from southern to northern U.S. in an attempt to escape persecution.

I sometimes fall short trying to put their collective wisdom into practice, but the attempts bring me joy and hope.

Eveline MacDougall lives in Greenfield.