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back breaking labor of an agricultural migrant. He worked in dairies, and when the withholding tax meant that he would be contributing, though unwillingly to the war budget, he went farther west and south and did day labor, collecting his pay in advance, so that no Treasury agent could catch up with him.
And with the strange inconsistency of us Americans, army men, tax men, were among those who hired him, and with the understanding that they would help him evade paying income tax.
He has led this life of daily labor for many years now. The community around Phoenix, Arizona has come more and more to accept him. Their hostility has grown into love and friendship. Like Gandhi, he calls all men his brothers, wherever they may be, in castles or hovels, in banks or on skid row. He is, what he attempting to be, a one-man-revolution.
Ammon was baptized on the feast of St. Gregory the Wonder worker, 1952, by Father Marion Casey, of the diocese of St. Paul. He is typically midwestern, tall, lank, long nosed and long faced, thin mouth and warm eyes, enduring rather than strong. He is the average American, and as pioneers before him, he stands pretty much alone. Next year, he will transfer his activities to Denver, the capitol of the west, where the president has his summer White House. He will begin again to picket, to fast, to work at hard labor in his new surroundings, reaching the man in the street by going to the man on the street. He will still be an editor of The Catholic Worker, an editor continually on pilgrimage, a roving editor, doing the work, the speaking and writing that he can do while he earns his living by the sweat of his brow.
And what is he accomplishing, in this one-man-revolution of his? Does he expect to change the world? When asked this last question once he said with characteristic wit, "I may not change the world, but I'll work so the world won't change me."
He told me a story the other day about a Chinese family who were digging a salt mine. The father did not expect to get this done in his life time, the son did not expect to get it done in his, and perhaps the grandson did not expect to get it done in his. But if they kept at it, one day it would be dug.
Ammon is a man of vision, of which there are too few. Sometimes he may seem to be hoping against hope, but I prefer to remember that other quotation of St. Paul's. He has the charity that "rejoiceth in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things." Let us pray that he will abound in Charity which "never falleth away, whether prophesies shall be made void, or tongues shall cease, or knowledge shall be destroyed." God bless him.
Dorothy Day
