January/February 2000

The Redeeming Power of the Small

by Walter Wink

The other world is like a thorn

In the ear of a tiny beast!

The fingers of the executives are too thick

To pull it out!¹

It is of the nature of the Powers that they wish to appear invincible. They do not want their great vulnerability revealed. They hire public relations firms, or develop a priestly cultus (Rev. 13:11-18), or threaten and cajole (13:5-10), in order to bedazzle us into acceding to their omnipotence (13:14-15). Blinded by smoke and mirrors, their hapless victims gasp, "Who is like the Beast, and who can fight against it?" (Rev. 13:4).

We can declare it to be a law, therefore, that whenever we feel powerless, we have come under the deluding spell of some Power. It is never the case–ever–that a person is in fact really powerless. Even in situations of absolute extremity, one has power, even if it is only in the choice of the attitude with which one dies. There is no such thing as objective powerlessness. Our belief that we are powerless is a sure sign that we have been duped by the Powers.

Half a million people were gathered at the White House to protest continued involvement in the Vietnam war, and at the end of the day President Nixon issued a statement saying that he had paid no attention to their presence, but had watched football on TV. After that it became markedly harder to mobilize people for demonstrations. "Why try," they would sigh; "if Nixon ignores us, what's the use?" The release of the White House tapes during the Watergate trials painted quite a different picture of the President's response. He and his aides were beside themselves, and spent the day fabricating a press release that would undermine the stupendous success of the rally. The image-makers won by persuading the demonstrators, at the moment of their greatest victory, that they were powerless.

Jesus walked among the powerless; his whole ministry was hope and empowerment for the hopeless. His healings and exorcisms were more than simply restorations to health; they were visitations of the New Reality: "But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you" (Luke 11:20). He tells a parable about a widow who cannot get justice from an unjust judge (Luke 18:1-8). Since women had no standing in court, she should have been represented by her father, or uncles, or brothers, or sons. She has no one. Widows typically inherited little, so the hearer would most likely presume that she is suing a business partner or relative of her deceased husband to return her dowry, which her husband would have had the right to invest while he was alive. Without it she could not live. Jesus has so shaped the parable that no ray of hope lights up the picture.

So what does she do? She "importunes"; she badgers the judge every day, accosts him on the way in to his benches and on the way out. She even threatens to become violent; he finally gives her justice for fear that she will "fly in my face" (a technical term from boxing, meaning to "give a black eye"). This utterly powerless widow has become more powerful than this aloof and indifferent judge!

Faith always begins at the point of powerlessness. It is the sense of powerlessness that evokes it, that makes nothing less than a miracle practical. Five thousand people are on the hill, famished with hunger, and when the disciples report this to Jesus, he answers, as if it were the simplest thing in the world, "You give them something to eat" (Mark 6:37). Impossible. There are no markets nearby, and if there were, they would not have enough for so large a crowd. Then use what you have, he retorts: five loaves and two fishes. And that will prove enough (Mark 6:31-44). (Perhaps the people were inspired to share the food they had brought along.)

This motif–the sufficiency of the infinitesimal–pervades Jesus' teaching. One does not need great faith, he says, but only as much as a grain of mustard seed–which is to say, an almost imperceptible amount. For faith is not belief in one's own belief, nor is it a quantifiable energy charge that has to reach a critical mass to have effect. It is simply believing God to be real, and therefore capable of acting (Luke 17:5-6). The parables abound with images of the inconspicuous beginnings of the New Reality. Only a few seeds land in good soil–but they produce an astonishing yield (Mark 4:1-9 par.). Only a little leaven, hidden in the dough–and look!–fifty pounds of bread! (Matt. 13:33//Luke 13:20-21). And once again the mustard seed, the tiniest seed that this carpenter had ever seen: to those who were looking for a mighty kingdom like the towering cedar promised in Ezekiel 17:22-24, Jesus mockingly offers this prodigious...shrub!

And who will people this divine realm? The poor, the mourners, the hungry, the persecuted–yes, and the church adds, looking around the circle at its motley recruits, also the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers (Matt. 5:3-12). That word "meek" is itself instructive. It connotes "gentleness" (Matt. 11:29), unpretentiousness, and refers here to the landless peasants who have no more inheritance in Israel. Eduard Schweizer renders it, "Blessed are the powerless"–for they shall inherit the soil from which they have been displaced through chronic indebtedness.2

How curious that Jesus looked to these for the future. Why did he not focus on educated and committed scribes or Pharisees? Why did he not seek out the brightest and best of Israel? Why did he content himself instead with illiterate fisherfolk like James and John, Peter and Andrew, wholly lacking in the arts of speech, exegesis, interpretation of the law–and themselves lax in the law's observance (Mark 2:18, 23; 7:1)? Why pick a toll collector like Levi (Mark 2:13-14), whose past could only cast a shadow of shame over the whole band? Why does Jesus not only teach about, but risk his whole ministry on the sufficiency of the infinitesimal?

Perhaps we can find metaphors in recent science. The old notion that only massive amounts of energy can make massive changes is crumbling under the discovery of triggering mechanisms in cybernetics, miniaturization in computers, and in the concept of the brain as a "cascade amplifier" in engineering. These studies, according to Kenneth Pelletier, have graphically demonstrated that minute units of energy can have an effect on macro or large systems, as when the mere interruption of a beam of light is used to open a two-ton bank vault door. Recent theories concerning the neurophysiology of consciousness propose that similar processes occur in the brain, but this has required a reversal of the way we usually think of waves. In the case of sound or water, waves require more energy the longer they become. Einstein theorized that photons, the most fundamental particle in the atom, behave just the opposite; their energy increases with their frequency, or rate of oscillation. The higher the frequency of the photon, the higher its state of energy. The faster the oscillation, the shorter the wave. With this discovery, Einstein deduced that infinite energy could be compacted in infinitely short wave lengths. Applying this to consciousness, Pelletier hypothesizes that the smallest quantum magnitudes are sufficient to affect a large system such as the brain, bringing about major changes or responses.3

The idea that energy can be inversely proportionate to size no longer strikes us as so novel, now that we have at least some sense of the power released when even a single atom of hydrogen undergoes fission. We are slowly beginning to inhabit an Einsteinian universe. But the concept has yet to affect the way we see events in the world. We still equate largeness with power, rather than seeing it as a limitation on certain kinds of change.

Consider for example a figure skater, spinning with her arms outspread. As she draws her arms in (thus decreasing her radius) she spins faster. Her rate of spin is called "angular momentum," expressed by the formula: A=mvL, where angular momentum (A) is equal to mass (m) times velocity (v) times the radius of the turning object (L). The conservation of angular momentum demands that A remain constant; therefore, when the radius (L) decreases, velocity (v) must increase. The implications are mind-boggling; for this means that an infinitely small radius can store infinite energy.4 Smallness may be a virtue rather than a limitation.

Or consider two billiard balls connected by a string, whirled overhead. The shorter the string, the faster they rotate; the longer the string, the slower. Theoretically, the speed of rotation approaches infinity when the string is further shortened. Its velocity reaches the maximum when it is smallest.5 The practical consequence of this physical principle is the unimaginable power of the atom, where an almost infinitely small radius stores an almost infinite energy; but it also serves as a parable for social change.

Change is not always the consequence of large concentrations of energy; indeed, massive amounts of energy generally go to maintaining the status quo. But life is a process that occurs far from equilibrium, as Ilya Progogine has shown.6 Paradoxically, when an open system approaches a state of extreme stability, only a minuscule amount of energy is required to perturb its equilibrium. It is precisely when such systems appear most invulnerable that their vulnerability may be at its maximum. Perhaps Paul's repeated admonition to constancy in prayer is related to the fact that we cannot know at what moment this imperceptible vulnerability will become constellated.

Microevents govern the most profound changes in the human psyche as well. Carl Jung comments, "That the greatest effects come from the smallest causes has become patently clear not only in physics but in the field of psychological research as well."7 These subatomic firings in the psyche have world-historic consequences in human behavior, thought, invention and art.

Things often begin so small. The human egg cell that produced a Jesus, a Buddha, or a Gandhi, weighs only about one twenty-millionth of an ounce. In the process of growing up it becomes some fifty billion times heavier.8 Familiarity blinds us to this miracle: in each case that egg weighing one twenty- millionth of an ounce changed the very face of history.

One of the richest examples of this principle is the story of Gideon's defeat of the Midianites (Judges 6-9), one of the earliest accounts in recorded history of warfare conducted wholly nonviolently by one side, though it was, admittedly, calculated to induce violence in the foe. When Gideon called out the tribes of Manassah, Asher, Zebulun and Naphtali to fight their oppressors, and 32,000 men responded, the Lord said to Gideon, "The people with you are too many for me to give the Midianites into their hand, lest Israel vaunt themselves against me, saying, 'My own hand has delivered me.' Now therefore proclaim in the ears of the people, saying, 'Whoever is fearful and trembling, let him return home.'" Twenty-two thousand departed; ten thousand remained.

"And the Lord said to Gideon, 'The people are still too many; take them down to the water and I will test them there.'" Everyone that lapped the water with his tongue (that is, by cupping water in one hand and lifting it to his mouth), God told Gideon to keep, and all those who knelt to drink, God sent away. (Perhaps those who lapped with one hand kept their weapons at the ready in the other, showing themselves more prepared to fight than others.) Three hundred remained. "With the three hundred men that lapped I will deliver you, and give the Midianites into your hand," a satisfied God responds.

Gideon and the three hundred crept up upon the Midianites in the middle of the night and encircled their camp, nestled in the hollow of a valley. Each man held a trumpet in one hand and a torch, lit and concealed under a jar, in the other. On signal they all broke the jars and blew the trumpets, crying between blasts, "A sword for the Lord and for Gideon!" They stood every man in his place round about the camp, and the Midianites, thinking themselves surrounded and outnumbered, each fell on his brother and scattered in a panic of flight.9

Reduce the radius and the velocity increases. God is the virtuoso of the infinitesimal, whose trademark is tiny, insignificant, pawed-over Israel.

Of course, all attempts at change mobilize resistance. The power of What-Is attempts to squelch That-Which-Attempts-To-Be. Perhaps What-Is succeeds, but in the very act of repression, draws attention to and gives credibility to the emergent new. Psychotherapists are trained to recognize massive resistance as a hopeful sign; it means that the resistance may be on the verge of capitulating altogether. Institutions function the same way. "When the Church is about to accept a mutation in doctrinal explanation or disciplinary direction, the whole edifice of tradition refuses to acknowledge the possibility of change." Precisely at that point, argues Francis X. Murphy, the turnabout has begun.10

Resistance to Jesus led to the cross; it did not succeed in stopping the New Reality that he brought. How paradoxical, how counter to all our fantasies about power, that when God seeks to turn the world around, one person is sometimes enough.

I do not wish to be naive; there is a place for massive energies and massive demonstrations. But we ignore the redeeming power of the small to our great loss. If many are needed, the few will gather them. For the only kind of social transformation that could make a real difference will have to come from below, not above, and will be the effort of the marginalized, not those at the center.

Social change moves like a baboon troop. The chief baboons seldom take the initiative, for they are located at the center of the troop, and are respected and trusted precisely because they conserve and represent the survival values of the troop. Initiatives toward movement are made at the fringes by individual members of the troop. Their effectiveness depends strongly on the status of the initiator. An initiative by a respected old baboon may be followed or supported by many neighboring colleagues, while a similar initiative by a young baboon may receive no support. As a result of multiple initiatives, the troop shifts its shape rather like an amoeba. Here and there the periphery of the troop protrudes in a kind of pseudopod which may persist or withdraw again. After about half an hour of such indecisive activity, several dominant males near the center of the troop will rise and move decisively toward one of the pseudopods. The troop then moves purposefully in the direction initiated by that pseudopod to forage for that day.11

Perhaps we let ourselves be fooled into believing, by the kind of history we were forced to study in schools, that history is made only by rulers and generals. But the powerful seldom take the really creative initiatives that have brought the greatest gifts to the world. In fact, as often as not, those at the center attempt to throttle the new in its crib, like Herod slaughtering the infants (Matt. 2:16-18). But usually the Powers are unable to isolate the creativity at the edges because they are too out of touch with it.

Just such a marginal woman, achieving the good from below the threshold of official notice, was celebrated by Hope D. J. Harle-Mould [see p. xx].

While she types, another person bakes. He sells the bread he makes at churches and bake sales to raise money and solicit members for Bread for the World, a Christian group that seeks to eradicate the roots of world hunger by working politically at the causes. With each loaf he encloses a brochure on Bread for the World and his own personal credo: "Each of us alone cannot feed the hungry. Together–through Bread for the World–we can." His kitchen had become too small; he plans to build a wood-fired oven in his backyard to increase his yield and conserve energy.

So simple! So small! Yet these microevents have effects far beyond their scale. They are like those incalculable amounts of water that fall, droplet by droplet, into desert ground and disappear, only to emerge at some distant point as a seemingly miraculous source of refreshment. So it is with such faithful daily acts of love.

Unknown to us, people all over the globe are being those droplets that renew the aquifers of life. Two women, operating on a shoestring budget in New Orleans, plus a sprinkling of volunteers, almost singlehandedly held back a wave of death- penalty executions in Louisiana.15 One young lawyer, "just an ordinary guy who got mad" at the sight of homeless men sleeping on the streets of New York City, forced an indifferent administration, by court order, to provide clean and safe shelter to any man who asks for it.16 A single mental health professional prevented an attempt to repeal Indiana's child abuse laws by personally sharing his concerns with every state legislator.17

Even in situations of relative powerlessness, where fear of unemployment or reprisal blocks certain actions, other acts remain possible. "I saw the War Without Winners show just now," wrote Barbara Hurd to Admiral LaRocque of the Center for Defense Information, a nuclear disarmament group drawn largely from former Defense Department personnel. "Please send me all available information on what we can do to help make some kind of difference in the battle against Battle. I'll volunteer as much time and effort as possible and necessary. Owen will too. He just turned 2. Daddy would like to help but he works too hard making Minuteman missiles, which he hates to do but we have to eat."18 A situation so far from equilibrium is clearly too unstable to continue unchanged for long, and for this family it can only be costly. But now there is no turning back. The widow's fists are clenched and pounding on the judge's door.

There are thousands of such stories. Each such act not only sandbags the levee against the flood of human evil, it inspires others to walk away from self-preoccupation and do something meaningful too. I have observed that people in despair about the world seldom are acting on their analysis, and those who are acting are seldom in despair. Does not Jesus' challenge to the disciples, "You give them something to eat," mean that in every crisis, regardless how grave the threat or abject our sense of powerlessness, we have at hand, if we only open our eyes to see, the resources for some human means of response?

There are other, more dramatic acts as well, that cause us to catch our breaths, or even change the way we live, because they are backed with the very blood of the actor. As the spinning skater's arms draw in, she spins faster; as the personal risk of the actor increases, the historic effects are augmented. An infinitely‘ selfless act can thus release infinite energy. That is why Jesus' death would have "set a host of captives free" even if no doctrine of redemption had ever been formulated. Its formulation was simply after-the-fact anyway: an attempt to account for the reality that this man's giving of himself in love for others freed them from the Powers that oppress, to live authentically for others.

Every time some human skater on this rink of earth thus pulls in the arms, be it by hammering on missile nose-cones or stalking a Trident base, or even befriending a lonely soul, her or his angular momentum increases; an energy heretofore dissipated is suddenly concentrated: the more self-giving, the more infinite the energy. Often, when the mass is extremely large (as in the anti-nuclear demonstrations in Europe in the early 1980s), the amount of sacrifice to each individual can be so portioned out that it becomes minuscule–the cost and time for travel, perhaps an employer's or a neighbor's ire. The mass is large, however, usually only toward the climax of a struggle, after long, often frustrating efforts by a few. It is in the early stages that the greatest individual sacrifices must be made–Vinny McGee, burning his draft card; John Pairman Brown, lying down alone beneath the oncoming wheels of the first prototype of the B-1 bomber. Then it is that, in the absence of mass, angular momentum can only be achieved by an increase of velocity (v), which means that the radius (L) must be reduced. In brief, the fewer the persons, the faster they must spin. The smaller the mass that participates, the more the risk must increase for the individual.

Many sympathetic people wondered why the great Soviet dissident, Andrei D. Sakharov, had chosen to use the last weapon remaining to him–a fast unto death–merely to gain the right of a young woman to emigrate to marry his stepson in America. But in doing so, Sakharov was dramatizing the value of individual humanity. He was reminding everyone how relentless, how petty, the secret police could be. His whole life had been a slow drawing in of the arms, from his early opposition to capital punishment, to his advice to Soviet leaders that the hydrogen bomb he had helped develop not be further tested, to his donations of the large sums in Soviet prizes he won to cancer clinics. An old friend and fellow dissident commented, "What happened...when they arrested him and exiled him to Gorky was an act of despair on the part of the government. It is an example of how one man–one very ill, very weak man, who has already had two heart seizures; a very modest man, a very calm man–can be stronger than this superpower, with all its millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of policemen and millions of party members...he is stronger than this system of might."19 After fasting almost to death, Sakharov won. His arms were almost flush to his sides; you could feel the energy of his spin around the whole earth, so concentrated, so tiny had he become.

Father Roy Bourgeois has been in and out of jail for protests intended to close the diabolical "School for the Americas," where generations of Latin American dictators and torturers have been schooled by our government in the arts of terror. How can people such as he voluntarily take on such suffering, over and over? They are like fleas in the hide of a mighty beast; the gun butts of the officers are too blunt to dig them out.

A=mvL, the exact formula for social change. On this spinning earth there are these solitary spinners, the gyrospheres of social sanity, whose independent revolutions at near blinding speeds somehow provide our equilibrium. How right the Jewish saying, that were it not for thirty-five righteous people, the world would be destroyed.

It is a perennial error of congregations to think of effectiveness almost solely in terms of numbers: if (or when) we are larger, then we will be able to make a difference. Most social change does, of course, come through movements, groups, organized bands of dedicated workers. We normally notice them only at their peak, however, when they have commanded media attention and are on the verge of some success. Perhaps we should perform an archaeology of their origins to see how they were started. We might then discover that almost every change in the world can be traced to one person, or a few, determined to make a difference.

France was forced to stop atmospheric nuclear testing in the Pacific by one woman, Dr. Helen Caldicott. Sparked by Bertrand Russell's autobiography, this Australian pediatrician became concerned about the effects of strontium-90 in children's milk. Her letter to the local paper generated some supportive correspondence and an interview on a TV news show. Others joined in. The big break came when a government employee slipped her a suppressed government report; it contained data confirming that a high level of radiation had been found in South Australian drinking water in 1971. Reverberations from that disclosure led to massive national movement. Helen Caldicott found herself one of a delegation of three sent by the protest movement to France. Pressure by Australia and New Zealand finally brought the issue before the International Court of Justice, and France stopped atmospheric testing.21

But she was only getting started. By 1977 she had persuaded the Australian trade unions to boycott the mining and transport of uranium until a year-long nationwide debate and referendum on its health hazards was held, a position to which the Australian Labor Party also subscribed.22 And while that struggle still went on, she traveled around the world, organizing in many countries groups of doctors concerned about the medical nightmare of a nuclear war, and speaking at anti-nuclear rallies. All this from just one pediatrician who cared for kids enough to see that they have a world to grow up in.

Or take the infant formula issue. On May 24, 1981, the World Health Organization (WHO) voted, 118 to 1, with three abstentions, to adopt a code restricting the marketing of infant formula, especially in Third World countries.23 Behind that story is a multitude of doctors, missionaries, filmmakers, UN experts, and concerned citizens who tried, without avail, to change the policy of the offending corporations. That UN vote would probably never have happened but for three people, Leah Margulies, Mark Ritchie, and Douglas Johnson. Meeting at Palacios (?), Texas in 1976, they decided to develop a grassroots campaign in churches to put pressure on the companies. From that tiny beginning came INFACT–Infant Formula Action Coalition. Its budget the first year, only $500, was raised door to door; during most of the years that followed, a group of only around twenty-five volunteers in Minneapolis carried on the day-to-day struggle, writing letters, speaking at churches, meeting with corporation representatives. The idea of a boycott of Nestle, the largest producer, sprang spontaneously from church audiences. Largely through the boycott, plus shareholder resolutions from groups coordinated by the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, the issue was at last catapulted to world prominence in the WHO vote five years later. In 1984, after eight years of struggle, Nestle finally signed an agreement promising to comply with the new code.

Bread for the World, mentioned earlier, began in New York City in the early '70s with often fewer than five people in regular attendance. When Frances Moore Lappe, author of Diet for a Small Planet, founded Food First, an institute for food and development policy, it opened with an office of just three people. Six years later, with nine staff and dozens of volunteers, it reached thirty million people in more than fifty countries. The G. D. Searle pharmaceutical company was forced to change its labeling by a small British consumer group, Social Audit. Only two people were working on the issue, "and we kept Searle very busy indeed," one of them commented.24 And credit for discovering the "circle of poison" created by the export of banned pesticides to Third World countries goes, not to research scientists in agricultural colleges or vigilant watchdogs at the Environmental Protection Agency, but to a solitary Peace Corps worker in Afghanistan, David Weir, who noticed that the contents of a Kool-Aid package being sold there listed cyclamates, even though they had been banned in the States. (You can see why powerful business interests wish to repeal regulations requiring disclosure of such data!) Ten years of inquiries led to his book (with Mark Shapiro), Circle of Poison,25 which for the first time brought the issue of overseas dumping of chemicals outlawed in the United States to world attention.

These are but pebbles from a mountain of such stories of plain people moved to action. Each is like an electronic occasion which, when it is completed, remains as a cause whose effect is transmitted forever at the speed of light into the rest of the universe. Such microevents are the leaven hidden in the lump of the world. Watch closely: the leaven is rising.

I do not wish to end on a triumphalist note, however. The small is often also crushed. The powerless usually lose. Truth seems forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne. Our dreams of success fade. Our visions of how God will surely reward our commitment are disconfirmed by the leaden reality, the sheer immovability, of the Powers. We are not able, in our own power, to transform the world, or even the tiny sector of it where we find ourselves. On realizing this, many abandon the attempt. Others are driven to discover the real meaning of reliance on God. Perhaps this is why the vast majority of social activists who have persevered in the United States seem to have been religiously motivated.

It is, after all, God who redeems by means of the small. "The people with you are too many for me to give the Midianites into their hand, lest Israel vaunt themselves against me, saying, 'My own hand has delivered me.'" It is not in our power. It is a miracle. Gandhi reminds us that "all miracles are due to the silent and effective working of invisible forces," of which he believes nonviolence to be the most invisible and most effective.26 But even more subtle and invisible is the power of the Holy Spirit working through love, the love that knows no defeat because it has abandoned the need for success. Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement and herself one of the thirty-five righteous ones for whose sake the world of her generation was not destroyed, wrote to someone considering starting up a hospitality house for the homeless:

Our hope does not reside in confidence in our own capacities. It is grounded in the God who creates out of nothing, and has "chosen things low and contemptible, mere nothings, to overthrow the existing order" (1 Cor. 1:28 NEB). The exhilaration comes in knowing that the more we pull in our arms, the faster we spin, approaching a velocity that is infinite. We simply do not know the limits of the redeeming power of the small. Perhaps there are none. q

Footnotes

1. Robert Bly, "Romans Angry about the Inner World," The Light Around the Body (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 9.

2. Eduard Schweizer, The Good News according to Matthew (London: SPCK, 1976), p. 89.

3. Kenneth Pelletier, Toward a Science of Consciousness (New York: Delta, 1978), p. 60. On this subject see the whole section, pp. 58-66.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ilya Prigogine and Isabel Stengers, Order out of Chaos (New York: Bantam, 1984).

7. Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious C.W. 9.1 (1971), 224.

8. Theodosius Dobzhansky, The Biology of Ultimate Concern (New York: New American Library, 1967), 23.

9. I cannot vouch for the historicity of this narrative. That such guerrilla tactics have worked against far larger forces in our own time is amply documented. My interest is the same as that of those who preserved it: the redeeming power of the small. Gene Sharp states in categorical terms the lesson of Gideon: "In some cases methods which rely on the high-quality action of a few people may be more appropriate than those that rely on large numbers of less disciplined participants" (The Politics of Nonviolent Action [Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973], 3: 628).

10. Cited by Clyde F. Crews, review of The Papacy Today, by Francis X. Murphy, in The Christian Century, October 14, 1981, 1033.

11. George Edgin Pugh, The Biological Origin of Human Values (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 241, citing the work of Hans Kummer.

12. Hope Harle-Mould wrote this in a circular letter to his friends. The American address of Amnesty International, for those who would like to adopt a prisoner, is 322 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10117-0389.

13. Bread for the World newsletter, May, 1981. Their address is 802 Rhode Island Ave., NE, Washington, DC 20077-5204.

14. John Howard Yoder, The Original Revolution (Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 1972), 164.

15. "Sweat-box Death and Other Horror Stories," frying pan , June 1981, pp. 34-37.

16. "Attorney for Homeless Worked in Two Worlds," New York

Times, August 30, 1981, p. 48.

17. People for the American Way newsletter, June 1981, p. 6. (2000 M St., NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20036).

18. "Nuclear War Prevention Kit," Center for Defense Information.

19. Tom Wicker, "Act of Despair," New York Times , December 14, 1981.

20. El Mercurio, Santiago, Chile, 13 de Marzo, 1981.

21. "Our Own Worst Enemy," Fellowship 45 (June 1979), pp. 3-6.

22. See her forceful Nuclear Madness (New York: Bantam, 1980), p. 70-71.

23. Infant formula merchants were discouraging breast feeding and promoting their product in countries where women could not afford the powder. Often the parents overdiluted the formula, causing malnutrition, or mixed it with unsanitary water, resulting in diarrhea and often death. Sales personnel dressed in white coats passed out free samples to women in the hospital. Advertisements portrayed bottle feeding as fashionable and breast feeding as old hat. UNICEF estimated the mortality rate from

improper bottle feeding to be a million infant deaths annually. See Multinational Monitor, April 1984, pp. 14-17).

24. "G. D. Searle agrees to change labelling under pressure from research group," Multinational Monitor, December 1981, p. 5.

25. David Weir and Mark Shapiro, Circle of Poison (Institute for Food and Development Policy, 2588 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94110).

26. M. K. Gandhi, The Science of Satyagraha, ed. Anand T. Hingorani (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhanan, 1970), p. 25.

27. Dorothy Day, "Houses of Hospitality–Primacy of the Spiritual," The Catholic Worker, January-February 1982, p. 3.