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:loveya::loveya::loveya::loveya::loveya::loveya::loveya::loveya::loveya: I love this woman, I truly do. I got this (warning: very long!) email in my inbox today; I don't know if it is up at her site. Doris "Granny D" Haddock, 94, Speaking May 6, 2004 at WAND conference
in Detroit, Michigan
Toward a new democracy
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Thank you.
I am on a long journey to take a good, long last look at my beautiful
country and to encourage as many people as I can to take up the ballot
and to brighten up the colors in our fast fading democracy. It has been
a long journey for me. While I enjoy making so many new friends along
the way, I would rather be back in my home in New Hampshire and walking
for leisure instead of in desperate search for a few more good
Americans to do the right and necessary thing.
I am tired but I have a ways to go. My life has been long and grand,
and I am about done with it, but I am determined to not say goodbye to
all of this until I can go to my rest in the soil of a good democracy
I know that many of you are working hard to speak the truth and speak
for justice, and to bring America back to some more sensible path. But
I am asking you now to do something more. This advice comes from what I
have seen along the 20,000 miles I have traveled since I left home in
October. The good news I bring you from a thousand places is that
Americans who have resisted voting in the past do want to vote this
year. They are motivated, and even in places where they are afraid
their votes will not be fairly counted, they are determined to vote
anyway. And here is some more good news: You do not have to believe the
polls that say the election will be close. It will not be close. The
pollsters do not reach the many millions of people who do not have
regular phones. Many of the people I met in housing projects, in
workshops, in music clubs, have only cell phones or no phones at all to
answer pollster questions. They all have strong opinions on the
election and they all are preparing to vote.
Here is the bad news, however. In all my travels thus far, I have never
run into the Democratic Party doing voter registration.
I remember when Will Rogers kidded that he wasn't a member of any
organized political party--he was a Democrat. Well, we cannot afford
that old joke anymore.
What little there is of the party seems focused on the careers of
candidates, not on the needs of people. You can't come around to a
housing project or a tough neighborhood just at election time and
expect much, but that is what happens--and that is why we often lose.
When we walked through the Cabrini Greens housing project the other day
in Chicago, we were the first people to do voter registration work
there in some time. So said many who were grateful we had come. That is
the story everywhere we have gone, from the Overtown and Little Haiti
neighborhoods of Miami to the Great Lakes.
The correction for this is not to call your party officials and raise
hell, because the political left is really not organizable. The Left is
authority-averse and will never be organized like the
authority-dependent political Right. But what we can do and must do is
far more powerful, if we will but do it.
On my way here I stopped in Battle Creek to visit the grave of
Sojourner Truth. There is also a statue of her downtown, and it bears
her words: "Lord I have done my duty and I have told the truth and kept
nothing back."
Now, friends, it is time for us to do our duty--to tell the truth and
hold nothing back.
You all get so many emails and read so many good columns and articles
that are sent to you--Krugman, Dowd, Cronkite, Ivins, Hightower,
Palast, Friedman and the few other heroes left in our otherwise silent
news media. You read them and send them to other members of our little
choir.
That is not enough. You must print them out and give them to your
neighbors and family members. You must run them off by the hundreds and
give them out at bus and train stations until they ask you to leave.
Then you must come back with more. The masses of our neighbors are not
getting the truth and we cannot expect them to vote wisely unless we
wise them up ourselves. No one can do this for us. No presidential
campaign can do more than spread around a few slogans and accusations.
The news media will not do it for us, as they are no longer in the
truth business. There is only you and me. We need to do a massive voter
education project, starting right now. I will have many of these little
fliers on my website soon for you to print off, or you can make your
own from all the material that comes your way.
Remember that many of us lefties are, as I said, authority-averse and
we like to make our own political decisions. Many others,
however--including many of our neighbors and friends--are
authority-dependent and, before changing their opinions, need to hear
the truth coming from the pens and mouths of people they trust. So when
Walter Cronkite writes a good piece, put his picture on it and take it
around to everyone who remembers him from his days as the most trusted
television newsman in America.
I worry that many of the expensive ads being run right now, by MoveOn
and others, will not be effective because so many people are resistant
to the facts, unless those facts are delivered by a known voice of
authority.
There are a few more things we must do.
We must meet with our awakened friends weekly--and I suggest that
Tuesday would be a good evening--to go out to the malls and the streets
and the fast-food restaurants to register young voters. It is a fun
evening, and you will be making a bigger difference than you can
imagine. Also take some of your issue fliers and you will do double
duty. Don't get permission, don't set up a table, don't take a clip
board if it gets you kicked out. Just go up to young workers and say
you are distributing voter registration forms to the workers in the
area, and ask them if they need to register to vote for president. And
check out the situation regarding people with criminal convictions:
many young people think they cannot vote, but they can. Many of the
young people in Cabrini Greens were amazed to know that their police
records would not prevent them from voting. We have tremendous work to
do.
Yes, go to your candidate meet-ups, but that is for strategy and mutual
admiration and cannot replace the shoe leather work that must be done
right now.
There is another suggestion that I would like to share with you.
Invite your neighbors to an election night party, and do it soon. Call
it a landslide party if you want to cheer up your Democrat neighbors
and confuse your Republican friends. Start building toward that
evening. Have them sign-up to bring food and drinks. Start sending them
issue papers. Make sure everyone is registered. Make sure everyone has
a ride to the polls, or has an absentee form. Help someone in a lower
income neighborhood or housing project organize a landslide party, too.
Have your neighbors organize some food and maybe some school and art
supplies for the children in that other neighborhood. Consider having
some events soon to get people involved and thinking ahead to the
election. This is what I mean when I sometimes say that we must put the
party back in party politics. It has become so deadly. It is literally
deadly, as we see in the news how people are dying all over the world
for our lack of creative leadership and justice. It must come first
from our hearts, then into our neighborhoods and outward from there.
No political party or candidate or government can do it for us. It is
our democracy, but we must live it if we are to have it.
In spreading around the reprints of good newspaper articles, simply
assume that voters want good information about the issues, and give it
to them without feeling that you are being partisan. We are for the
truth, not for the advantage of some narrow political interest.
I am as non-partisan as I can manage. I am for any candidate or party
who will uphold the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, who would
never use lies to lead us into war, who will use our common resources
for the benefit of our children and all of our people, and who will
keep our homeland secure by protecting its mountains, streams, lakes,
forests, and air, and who will make the United States of America a
proper and respected symbol and an advocate for justice, freedom and
peace in the world. How could anyone say that my specifications are
anything but American, and that they should describe any candidate
offered by any serious and reputable political party? If my
specifications are partisan today, shame on any who made them so.
We must not think we are being partisan when we speak and share the
truth with our fellow citizens, and when we help them register to vote.
We will do so where we please as citizens, and let no corporation tell
us that their aisles or sidewalks are not free speech zones where our
Constitution somehow does not apply. The Articles of our Constitution
trump their articles of incorporation. Let us take back our rights as
citizens to create public space where we choose.
And choose we must, and choose to act now--this week, next week. We
cannot live in peace and justice, love and prosperity if we sit on our
plentiful asses reading email and shaking our heads in dismay. We must
rise to our great positions as the women of the community, who
organize, who see things, who speak the truth, who lay shame on those
who would ruin our communities and our lives. We cannot go about the
rotten business of being the pampered belles who live lives of luxury
in the plantation house of the world, if that is what America has
become. No, we don't shop at shameful places like Wal-Mart because they
ruin our family businesses and we don't spend our money at Disney parks
or stores because they are trying to block the release of Michael
Moore's new film, which is all about the truth.
We are the women of America and it is time some very bad-acting members
of our society felt the sting of our mighty slap.
It is time we stopped waiting for government to bring love and justice
into our communities and we began doing the work that needs to be done.
The sooner we do this, the sooner the elections will go our way,
because organizing is organizing, and it has a progressive result.
It is time we stopped hoping for a more effective party to do our work
for us. Millions of people like you and I are now connecting with all
the organizations that are working toward November. This is the
evolution of a new kind of politics--a human-scaled politics--and it
must extend long past the election and change the way we live. It must
be the rise of human beings against institutions that have become
useless or oppressive. So we reinvent the parties. We reinvent the news
media, we reinvent the economy. And in this, the corrupted press, the
big box stores, and the old and unrepresentative political systems can
and will be rolled over into the soil as our new shoots emerge. Many
groups are doing great work right now, educating and registering
millions of people with the help of people like you and me. It is an
uprising of a kind--a good kind; it is part of the revolution we are
privileged to have every four years.
Many organizations have received quite a bit of money from Mr. Soros
and others to do voter work, and many of them need to get more people
on the street. If I can be on the street, running on my poor credit
cards, they ought to be out on the street, too--but I haven't seen much
of them. My trek survives on small internet donations and I can't
imagine the good we could do if we had real resources to match up with
all the opportunities we see.
Finally, let me urge those who think Mr. Nader is a better candidate
than Mr. Kerry not let their high opinions of their own political
correctness cause the deaths of thousands of people in the world over
the next four years, which would be the real result of such narcissism.
According to Bruce Ackerman's wonderful editorial in the New York Times
yesterday, Mr. Nader can avoid risking this outcome if he will name the
same Electoral College electors as Mr. Kerry. Votes will register for
Mr. Nader, but they will apply to Mr. Kerry if Mr. Nader has
insufficient votes to win.
We all have work to do to get to November and to move into the years
ahead. Let us make it joyful and selfless work.
On the night of November 2nd we will go to bed, and the next day the
world will have gone one of two very different ways. I will be home in
New Hampshire. If it goes right, I will feel like resting--and I
haven't felt like I could rest for a very long while.
I hope my journey has resulted in some ideas that will be useful to
you. I know you are dedicated to this better world we see ahead. It is
not beyond our grasp.
Thank you.
for the trek weblog and ways to get involved: http://GrannyD.com |
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