A Hunger For Justice

Born and reared in Short Hills, N.J., Loving graduated from Ithaca College in 1974, has an MBA from Syracuse and worked most of his professional life in the computer industry helping to turn around failing organizations. But he gradually came to realize that he felt empty "making rich people richer."

In 1997 he left his job as a vice president of a software company, enrolled in a graduate counseling course and took a job as a school counselor in the impoverished Delaware County city of Chester in Pennsylvania. In the fall of 2001, anguished by the plight of the children there, he left his wife of 27 years and their two sons, now 22 and 26, along with the bulk of his assets, moved into his car and put himself on a semi-starvation diet to express his outrage.

After reading about him in a newspaper, a suburban Philadelphia family, the Austins, took him into their home and gave him a job on the management team of their chain of stores, Relax the Back.

Loving says he has since gone into debt helping Timothy Phiri, a former anti-apartheid fighter in South Africa who was living in poverty in Chester with his family and unable to work until his immigration status was clear. Loving financed the family's asylum efforts, and paid much of the college tuition of Phiri's son, Obakeng.

Meanwhile, Loving remains largely estranged from his own family, although one of his sons, who asked not to be identified, visited him two weeks ago for the first time in a year and a half.

"He's always been a person of very strong conviction. And I believe he truly believes in his cause," said his ex-wife, Cathy. But, she adds, "it's been very painful."

Mary-Rachel Austin, 26, who has been a close friend of Loving's for five years since her husband's family took him in, said, "He's done it because more than anyone I know, he experiences others as his own family. When he thinks about those people in Darfur, he thinks they're his family. He has that without needing to meet them."

"I don't know for sure about the impact," said Phiri, who now works in the Bryn Mawr store of the Austin family's chain, "but someone must do something. There must be someone putting the first brick or cornerstone down."

For Phiri and Austin, there is something almost saintly about Loving. Steeped in the literature of nonviolent protest, he can expound at length on the importance of the heart. Citing the Jesuit thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, he says: "After we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love. Then for the second time in history, man will have discovered fire." Or, explaining his penchant for the New Testament: "If you take the deity out of Jesus, you get Gandhi."

Loving -- the emotion, not the man -- is the missing ingredient in the struggle to end suffering in Darfur, he avers, because with it comes the willingness for self-sacrifice.

"Our hearts know what to do with Darfur. . . . We have to stop thinking, stop talking and start loving. And then," he says, pulling back the hood of his orange sweat shirt to reveal a monklike expanse of shiny pate, "I always wondered what this was for. My entire life mission is this. So it was just, duh!"

And so, struck by the epiphany a week into his fast, Jay McGinley dubbed himself Start Loving (call him Start) and had the words emblazoned in a cross on his forehead, courtesy of a downtown tattoo parlor that offered the service free.

Since March 1, he estimates he has lost about 30 pounds, or three-quarters of a pound a day, from his 170-pound, 5-foot-8 frame. On water alone he held out until Tuesday, returned to a semi-starvation liquid diet for a couple of days, and is now back on no food. Taking in a few hundred calories occasionally, he hopes to stall the weight loss a little to let him last until late June. Better to bear witness over a longer period, he says, than just "winking out" before the United States will have had a chance to preside over the U.N. Security Council next month and have a final stab at action.

Sudanese Ambassador John Ukec Lueth Ukec, who has Loving's letter in a stack of papers on his office desk, said that Loving is on public property and breaking no laws, and that he has no official comment. "That doesn't mean we don't sympathize with his feelings," he said. "He is a human being and he has a right to protest. I'm sorry that he is very much misinformed. Otherwise several Darfuris would be with him.

"There are so many other ways to reduce the pain of others without inflicting pain on himself," the ambassador said, adding that he would be willing to give Loving a visa so that he could visit Darfur as a social worker. Loving could also witness the complexity of the situation in a place where, he said, securing a lasting peace has been complicated by infighting among rebel factions.

Told of the offer, Loving smiles and turns away. He reiterates that if others were to join him, they could fan out first to the Chinese Embassy, then to the Indian, and finally back to the White House, the better to cause enough commotion to plant the seed of action in President Bush's heart.

But he has no illusions that his lone protest will make a difference. "I'm here because my brothers and sisters are being killed. It's not my responsibility what others do. It's only my responsibility what I do. I can do nothing less in the face of this atrocity." He pauses to swallow his welling tears. "I wish I had thousands of lives to give. But I have mine and this is how I choose to spend it."