His obit probably didn't appear in any daily newspaper outside the Pioneer Valley. But on May 23, the world lost a giant when 93-year-old Wally Nelson of Deerfield, Mass. passed away.

His death was not a great surprise; Nelson had been in poor health for several years. But among people who strive for a more just and peaceful planet, his death leaves a gaping hole where our history was and where our future will go.

Wally--along with his wife, Juanita, who survives him--is best known as among the modern pioneers of the war tax resistance movement--those people who refuse their income and other federal taxes for reasons of conscientious objection.

It was a relatively novel idea--as was the federal income tax itself--when Wally and a handful of others decided that if the law and common sense protected our right not to be forced by the government to kill, we should and do also have the right not to be forced to pay others to kill in our name.

With half of all discretionary federal funds now being poured into our military juggernaut, that's a lot of killing. Wally Nelson didn't want any part of it in 1942, and he didn't want any part of it in 2002. And for 60 years, he defied them--successfully.

Nelson, an African-American who grew up with Jim Crow, refused military service in World War II; like many of the other CO's profiled recently in the PBS program The Good War...And Those Who Refused to Fight It, Nelson went to prison for his beliefs. He served 33 months of a five-year term, released in 1946. The next year, he was one of eight blacks participating in the first freedom rides across the South.

He was also among the very first--along with people like Rev. Maurice McCracken and Ernest Bromley, both in the Cincinnati area, both of whom also died in recent years--to take the additional step of refusing to pay for the permanent war economy put into place after World War II.

For years, the Nelsons successfully waged peace with the IRS. (It's not as unusual as it sounds; many long-time conscientious resisters are similarly successful. The IRS, in the end, is a collection agency; uncollectable debts are written off far more often than they result in jail. Fewer than a dozen war tax resisters have been jailed since World War II, almost all for related offenses like contempt of court rather than for tax offenses themselves.) In the early '70s, they settled in Western Massachusetts, helping to start a now-thriving local land trust and working the land.

In an interview three years ago in a local newspaper, Juanita--who at age 81 still farms their land--tied the couple's pacifism to their lifestyle. "I think the war business is an outgrowth of the way we live our lives. If we divide the land up, and some people own it and others don't--that's violence."

The Nelsons have not been outspoken leaders, nor agitators at the barricades.

For decades, they simply worked quietly to incorporate into their community and into their own lives their vision for a more peaceable and just world. In the process, through example, they've inspired thousands of other people to do the same.

And now, Wally is gone--like Ernest Bromley and Maurice McCracken, and many others you've never heard of, names like Abe Keller and John Affolter and Hazel Wolf and John Caughlan and Anci Koppel and Igal Roodenko and Abe Kauffman and Irv Pollack, people who kept living their beliefs for a half century or more, and whose experiences and wisdom are no longer with us. And they, of course, learned from the people who came before them; and we, in turn, hopefully learn; and with any luck, our children and grandchildren will thank us for it.