Worthy Dreams

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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16826

 

 

Worthy Dreams

 

By Doris 'Granny D' Haddock, GrannyD.com

September 23, 2003

 

Editor's note: The following is a speech delivered at a Rolling Thunder Tour

event in Manchester, NH.

 

 

 

 

 

Well here we all are again, some of us together for the first time but many of

us now getting to know each other rather well. This has been a special time in

the history of our nation. Through our anger and our pain we have also found

great joy. It is the joy of making our lives mean something – it is the joy of

connecting with deep values and worthy dreams.

 

 

 

And in the past few months I have come to understand that human values and truth

are winning, as they sometimes do. They are lighting up the dark and challenging

the politics of fear and lies with the politics of love and truth.

 

 

 

We don't know how many times we will be able to meet together – life is short –

so we should savor these moments. We should take a moment to recognize what has

been done by a small group of these friends here present and so many others

around our nation.

 

 

 

One of my favorite moments in this hard time was when, in a District of Columbia

courtroom, as I stood accused of reading the Declaration of Independence aloud

in the Capitol Rotunda, and for which I and many of my friends had been arrested

and jailed – we were there to push for campaign finance reform and to ask

Congress to declare its independence from special interest money – the judge

passed judgment on us. He could have kept us in jail for some time, of course.

What dear old Judge Hamilton said was exactly this – it is from the court

record:

 

 

 

" As you know, the strength of our great country lies in its Constitution and her

laws and in her courts. But more fundamentally, the strength of our great

country lies in the resolve of her citizens to stand up for what is right when

the masses are silent. And, unfortunately, sometimes it becomes the lot of the

few, sometimes like yourselves, to stand up for what's right when the masses are

silent. "

 

 

 

 

Well, he wasn't just speaking to me and to my friends in that room. He was

speaking to you – you brave souls who dared be Americans when that meant

speaking out for the soul of your nation, against a torrent tide of madness. It

became the lot of the few to speak out even when the greatest newspapers and

news broadcasters were silent, and when our very Congress was spineless and

complicit. You stood in small groups on street corners with signs. You wrote

letters and you protested and you emailed, emailed, emailed and shared what you

could find out. You suffered name-calling and abuse and many of you went to

jail. Our founding fathers led a revolution with bravery, but they were a strong

brotherhood of great men acting together, and sometimes it was just you, and

just him, and just her, and I want to say how proud I am of all of you, for the

tide has turned and you have turned it.

 

 

 

And sure, we have a long way to go, and the suffering is only beginning, and the

forces of fear are still in their ascendancy, though we now see their mortal

arc. We know now that a sleeping nation has awakened and our dear neighbors and

our Congressmen and newsmen who were so long asleep or so bent under their

anchor desks in fear have begun to remember who they are and what there jobs

are.

 

 

 

And who was it who held the torch while they were away but you, and you and you

– ye band of sisters and brothers?

 

 

 

Can we see forward to a time when the American government represents, all over

the world, the best and happiest instincts of the American people? Can we see a

time when we, each of us, can live in responsible balance with nature and all

other people? Can we evolve to our better selves as a nation, whose people are

at the reins of our own government and whose harsh past, harsh from its very

beginning, can move into the light? What better thing have we got to do?

 

 

 

Indeed, we have waited for the last minute, for the glaciers of our beautiful

old planet are melting and the people we have injured and oppressed are no

longer impossibly far away. We have come to a century of come-uppance, and we

can, I believe in my heart, come up to it. We have no choice, nor would we want

any other choice but to do our honorable best in the broad world and here at

home.

 

 

 

And now we have our election coming.

 

 

 

Well, we all have jobs to do in the next months. Many of you will work for

candidates. I think you must do that, and spare the fighting among yourselves in

favor of moving the message out to those who have given up on voting. We need

those votes, friends, and they do not come toward negative campaigning.

 

 

 

For myself, I intend to do one thing in this election.

 

 

 

Let me tell you that, for many long years, I worked in a shoe factory here in

Manchester. I know what it means to be a working woman. It is hard in this

culture, for there are many demands placed upon you. There is little time for

anything but for life's essentials.

 

 

 

In this election, voting has become one of life's essentials.

 

 

 

I want to help as many working women as possible by bringing them what they need

to register to vote and to see that they have the time off to vote, the rides to

the polls or the reminders they need to do this important thing for themselves,

their retirement, their families, and for their America and its freedoms and its

justice.

 

 

 

I love my little house in the woods of New Hampshire. I am comfortable there,

next to a bright stream. But I will be happy to run an errand, and I will do it

very soon. I will travel to work sites where women work to bring them what they

need to vote. I will walk through many towns to do this, finding as many

workplaces as I can, and I am going to buy a little red wagon for my voter

supplies. I will be happy to be driven between towns so that I can cover the

ground more quickly than when I walked the nation. My friends have helped me map

it out. We will cover 36 states and, with the help of my friends, we will visit

100,000 workplaces. There is only one thing that could possibly keep me from

getting back home in time to vote, and either way I shall be happy.

 

 

 

I do expect to be around for several more elections, but you never know. If this

is my last wish tour, then my last wish is that America's women, who worked so

hard amid great violence for the right to vote, take that now as a sacred duty

in 2004. It is not particularly easy to travel at my age, but I hope they will

take my little sacrifice as a nudge to inconvenience themselves and vote.

 

 

 

I will need your help. Go to GrannyD.com and volunteer to help me along the way.

And if there is something I can do along the way to help you in your own

mission, just ask.

 

 

 

Our friends and neighbors are full of common sense, and that is what a democracy

requires. If they have good information from awakened news people and from

candidates who will please, God, spare us the platitudes and spend their

millions on useful information so that a great nation might make an informed

choice, then we have good reason to let our hearts fill with hope. We must all

talk-up the election. We must all share information with our neighbors. We must

speak in calm tones and respect the dignity of our opponents even when it is

clear they are scoundrels, for the tone of our society is a part of the

substance of our society.

 

 

 

We must encourage our free press as it sputters back to life. Not only must we

demand and encourage good reporting, but we must take the best stories and copy

them out and share them with our friends and neighbors – to double their effect.

And we must encourage the news networks to get back in the business of exit

polling during the election. Many of us are worried about the honesty of our

elections. The networks pulled away from exit polling because they thought – or

they say they thought – that they got it wrong in Florida. In fact they got it

right. They do get it right and they are our best safeguard now for an honest

election. Demand exit polling. Create petitions to insist on it, and to pledge

to only watch coverage by networks who will provide it. And I hope good watchdog

organizations will be on hand to make records of those who are turned away from

voting.

 

 

 

And for ourselves more personally, we must vote and take our neighbors to vote

and call from lists that we must make to see that this is a turnout like no

other. And then our democracy will be safe enough to begin its larger awakening,

and God help us to see that day, for the world and all nature awaits that joy.

 

 

 

Finally, let me say that my hope is that we all vote so that our leaders will be

an expression of our highest civic values. You know, it is interesting that the

United Nations headquarters is in our country. It is interesting because the

United States is in a real sense a union of nations. Look around your community

and you will see your fellow Americans who are Iraqis and Palestinians and Jews

and Russians and French and Irish and Africans and South Americans and Europeans

and Catholics and Mormons and Buddhists and Sikhs and Moslems and Baptists and

Asians and Pacific Islanders and all the rest. This nation is a union of the

world's people and, my, that is a grand thing to celebrate. Our president and

our other leaders must be worthy of that America, and they must be men and women

of peace and creativity and joy. Only with such leadership, where all our

children are raised together with the best we can give them, where our

adventures into the broad world are unselfish and full of

light, can America prosper and survive this amazing time. What work we have to

do, and how we do love it!

 

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