A Grandmother Walks for America

by Doris Haddock ("Granny D")

On New Year's Day 1999, 89-year-old Doris Haddock began a 1,800-mile walk across the US, determined to reach Washington DC on January 24, 2000, her 90th birthday.

Known to her 11 great-grandchildren as "Granny D," Haddock averaged 10 miles a day, eating and sleeping in the homes of strangers she met along the way.

Granny D's message to the nation: "There can be no true equality so long as only the rich are represented at the table of power." It is my belief that a worthy American ought to be able to run for a public office without having to sell his or her soul to the corporations or the unions in order to become a candidate. Fundraising muscle should not be the measure of a candidate. Ideas, character, track record and leadership skills ought to be the measures of our leaders.

I have traveled as a pilgrim, and Americans have taken care of me through each of my 1,800 miles. If you knew, as I know from these last months, what a sweet and decent nation we live in, you would be all the more determined to raise it out of this time of trouble - this sewer of greed and cash that we have slipped into.

Friends, I have walked through a land where the middle class, the foundation of our democracy, stands nearly in ruins. Main streets have given way to superstores. Towns have died. Family farms, family businesses and local owners have given way to absentee owners and a local population of underpaid clerks and collection agents.

People are so stressed in their household economies, and in the personal relationships, that they have little time for participation in the governance of their communities or of their nation. They struggle daily in mazes and treadmills of corporate design and inhumane intent. They dearly believe their opinions matter, but they don't believe their voices count. They tell me that the control of their government has been given over to commercial interests. They cheer me on, sometimes in tears, but they wonder if we will ever again be a self-governing people - a free people. With the middle class so purposefully destroyed - its assets plundered by an elite minority - it should not surprise us that the war chests of presidential candidates are grotesquely overflowing with cash while children go hungry and elders must eat pet food to survive.

The wealth of our nation is now dangerously concentrated. The privileged elite intends to elect those who have helped them achieve this theft and who will help them preserve their position of advantage.

It is said that democracy is not something we have, but something we do. But right now, we cannot do it because we cannot speak. We are shouted down by the bullhorns of big money. It is money with no manners for democracy, and it must be escorted from the room.

While wealth has always influenced our politics, what is new is the increasing concentration of wealth and the widening divide between the political interests of the common people and the political interests of the very wealthy, who are now able to buy our willing leaders wholesale. The wealthy elite used to steal what they needed and it hardly affected the rest of us. Now they have the power to take everything for themselves, laying waste to our communities, our culture, our environment and our lives - and they are doing it. The soul of democracy is diversity, not concentration. Diversity requires the human scale, not monstrous scale.

What villainy allows this political condition? The twin viral ideas that money is speech and corporations are people. If money is speech, then those with more money have more speech. That idea is antithetical to democracy. It makes us no longer equal citizens. This perverse notion, and the general, unrestricted participation of corporate and - yes - union money in our elections, must be stopped if democracy is to survive. That riding-out-of-town-on-a-rail was done a century ago when Republican President Theodore Roosevelt pushed corporate money out of politics. It is time for us to get out that rail again.

Here is what Roosevelt said in 1907: "Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit ... The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces that they have themselves called into being. There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains."

Business corporations are not people. They are protective associations that we, the people, allow to be chartered for business purposes on the condition that they will behave. We must look to whether we can still afford, as a people and as a planet, to give these little monsters a birth certificate but no proper upbringing, no set of expectations and no consequences for antisocial behavior.

We are simply tired of the damage they do, and we are tired of cleaning up after them. If they are to be allowed to exist, they must agree to be responsible for their own activities - start to finish - without requiring public dollars to be used to clean their rooms up after them.

Parents know that there comes a time when infantile behavior persists but the child is too large to do much with. We Americans still can act in regard to the corporations we have given birth to, but not by much of an advantage. Our advantage will evaporate early in the 21st century if we do not act soon.

Politics today is characterized by anger and even hatred. Let's have none of it here. Anger drains your energy and makes you incapable of endurance or of creative leadership. Ask the failed leaders of the so-called "Republican Revolution" if I am right. Negativity has no place at the helm of a democracy. It doesn't know what to do with power when it gets it. Only joy and optimism - and love, really - can win in the long term.

General Eisenhower said, "Pessimism never won any battle." He was right. But where do you look to find optimism? Well, I have found it for you - out on the road. On the road, I have seen a great nation. I have felt it hugging my shoulders, shaking my hand, and cheering from across the way. I am so in love with this country. I know you are, too.

This is an edited version of a speech that Granny D gave during her walk. [For more information on Doris Haddock's crusade, check out the GrannyD.com website.]