Recognizing that the Bhoodan wasn’t working as they had hoped, the Jagannathans created Land for the Tillers’ Freedom (LAFTI) in 1981, an organization devoted to negotiating land sales to landless farmers, helping them learn better agronomical techniques, and making sure that they don’t default on loans and lose their land. LAFTI also teaches such marketable skills as brickmaking and mat weaving to Dalit children in order to help them rise from their impoverished backgrounds. Finally, in a program similar to Habitat for Humanity, LAFTI helps poor farmers build affordable homes for themselves. The goal of all the organization’s programs and campaigns is to find nonviolent solutions to the problems of rural poverty and landlessness.
In recent years, the Jagannathans have turned their attention to agricultural sustainability. Huge swaths of South India’s coastlines have been transformed into aqua-industrial shrimp farms. These mega-operations salinate the soil and pollute groundwater, degrading the environment and forcing small farmers off their land and into already overcrowded and poverty-stricken cities. The Jagannathans have mobilized coastal peasants to fight the aquaculture conglomerate.
Krishnammal and Sankaralingam’s labor on behalf of India’s rural poor was recognized with a 2008 Right Livelihood Award, the alternative Nobel Prize. In accepting the award, Krishnammal spoke for herself and her husband by calling for a paradigm shift of the world’s privileging those who already have more than they need at the expense of those who have too little.
20 February
A. J. Muste
8 January 1885—11 February 1967
Peace Is the Way
Night after night in the mid-1960s, an elderly man in an oversized coat and hat stood in front of the White House with a lit candle in his hand. His vigil was both a protest against the Vietnam War then raging and a general witness for peace. His name was A. J. Muste, and he was once described by Time magazine as the “Number One U.S. pacifist.”
Muste was born in the Netherlands but immigrated with his family to the United States when still a boy. Raised and eventually ordained in the Dutch Reformed Church, he left it in 1914 because he felt unable to endorse either its support of the war that erupted that year in Europe or its theological defense of apartheid in South Africa. He joined the more theologically liberal Congregationalists. But his relationship with that denomination came to an abrupt end as well. On Easter Sunday 1918, after preaching an anti-war sermon, Muste was immediately fired and ordered to vacate the parsonage that same day. He eventually joined the Society of Friends, but not before going through a period in the 1930s when he abandoned his Christian pacifism for Marxism-Leninism.
For Muste, it was Jesus rather than Marx or Lenin who was the real revolutionary. Muste saw the birth of Jesus as the harbinger of a new age in which human beings would build a new society based on peace with justice. The ideals taught by Jesus, Muste believed, radically challenged existing social, political, and economic institutions. They were revolutionary but nonviolent, because the kingdom of Heaven proclaimed by Jesus is nonviolent, and bad means simply can’t lead to good ends. As Muste insisted, “There is an inextricable relationship between means and ends; the way one approaches one’s goals determines the final shape which those goals take.” That’s why, Muste famously said, “There is no ‘way’ to peace. Peace is the way.”
Muste was a longtime member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, serving as its executive director for thirteen years, including during World War II. He was also a member of the War Resisters League’s national committee. In the 1950s, he protested the proliferation of nuclear weapons by refusing to participate in civil defense drills and by joining fellow pacifists at various nuclear testing sites across the globe to witness for peace. When accused of laboring under a naïve idealism that failed to appreciate the dangers of the “real” world, he responded that in fact it’s Christian pacifism that is realistic, because it renounces “obviously suicidal” war and war preparation and allows us instead to devote our funds and energies to “carrying a great ‘offensive’ of food, medicine, and clothing to the stricken peoples of the world.”
In early 1967, Muste travelled to North Vietnam to meet with Ho Chi Minh to discuss ways of ending the war. He died two weeks later.
21 February
John van Hengel
21 February 1923—5 October 2005
A Crazy Little Thing Called Food Bank
Years after he invented the food bank, John van Hengel reflected with some amazement on what he and hundreds of volunteers had managed to do. “It’s amazing how many people are being fed because of this crazy little thing we started,” he said. “We’re feeding millions and it’s not costing anyone anything.” Difficult as it is to imagine, given that food banks have become such familiar features of the cultural landscape—a fact that’s cause for grief as well as gratitude—the first one appeared only in 1967. Van Hengel opened it in Phoenix, Arizona, on a shoestring budget.
Born in Wisconsin, van Hengel moved to southern California after graduating from Lawrence University. Calling himself a “first-rate beach bum,” he held down an almost bewildering number of part-time or short-term jobs, working on different occasions as a publicist, ad man, waiter, truck driver, and salesman. He lived in California for nearly twenty years. But shortly after the breakup of his marriage, he moved back to his home state, where he continued to hold down a number of odd jobs until bad luck struck. Following a pretty brutal fistfight, van Hengel required spinal surgery that left him with a locked neck and palsy. After a lengthy recovery, he moved to Phoenix in the hopes that the warm climate there would improve his health. He volunteered at a local soup kitchen, where he also ate his meals, and lived modestly in a rented apartment over a garage.
Van Hengel got the idea for a food bank in 1967 after a homeless woman who regularly rummaged through trash cans told him how much perfectly good food was being thrown away by restaurants, bakeries, and supermarkets. She said that what the poor really needed was a place where food could be deposited and then drawn out—a food “bank.” Inspired by her suggestion, van Hengel borrowed start-up money and the use of an empty building from his church, St. Mary’s Basilica, scrounged food from local groceries, and gleaned vegetables and fruits from local farms.
In its first year, the food bank at St. Mary’s, which is still up and running, distributed a quarter million pounds of food to the needy. Ten years later, van Hengel expanded the operation by founding America’s Second Harvest, a national network of food banks that collects food from major corporations and then channels it to local charities. Second Harvest, now renamed Feeding America, routinely distributes about two billion pounds of food, feeding over twenty million Americans each year.
Van Hengel is estimated to have inspired or helped form at least one thousand food banks in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Thanks to his vision and industry, the man who called himself a “first-rate beach bum” helped feed millions of hungry women, children, and men. His efforts were rewarded in 1992 when he was given an Americas Award, described as the “Nobel Prize for goodness,” at a ceremony in Washington DC’s Kennedy Center.
22 February
Menachem Froman
1945—
Meeting the Other Side
The whole secret of religion,” says Rabbi Menachem Froman, “is meeting the other side.” When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that’s exactly what he’s been doing for over forty years: reaching out to Muslims in Israel and other countries—even to violent Muslim organizations such as Hamas—in the hope of building peace.
Froman