by Doris Rollins Haddock
This issue of Peace Talk honors Doris Rollins Haddock—Granny D—an extraordinary activist and inspiring example for all of us. Three cheers and a thousand thanks to you, Granny D. for showing us that, as you so aptly put it, “it’s never too late to raise a little hell.”

Doris was born in Laconia, New Hampshire in 1910; she graduated from Laconia High School and attended Emerson College in Boston; she married James Haddock, raised two children and worked for many years at a shoe factory.

Her political activism began in 1962 when she and her husband fought together to stop Edward Teller’s plans to use hydrogen bombs to build a port near an Eskimo village in Alaska. Their activism paid off when the plans were turned down by President Kennedy. In 1985 she fought against a proposed highway cutting through her home town of Dublin, N.H. and won.

In 1997, at age 87, Doris began studying campaign finance reform and organized a petition in support of the McCain/Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Bill. She gathered over 100,000 signatures, but the petition was virtually ignored by her representatives.

Doris decided to walk across the country in an attempt to galvanize attention toward the importance of campaign finance reform and the rampant corruption in the electoral system. She trained for the walk for a year.

On January 1, 1999, at the age of 89, she set out from Los Angeles on the epic walk across the country to demonstrate her concern for the issue, walking 10 miles each day for 14 months. Doris traveled as a pilgrim, walking until given shelter, fasting until given food. With the unflagging generosity of strangers she met along the way, Doris never went without a meal or a bed. She trekked over 1,000 miles of desert, climbed the Appalachian Range in blizzard conditions and even skied 100 miles after an historic snowfall made roadside walking impossible. After 14 months and four pairs of sneakers, Doris arrived in Washington D.C., where she was greeted by thousands of supporters. Several dozen members of Congress walked the final miles with her.

Two years later she would be hailed in the Senate at the passage of the Mc- Cain/Feingold Bill.

In 2000, she was arrested at the Capitol for reading the Declaration of Independence aloud.

The following year Random House published Doris’ memoir, Granny D: Walking Across America in My 90th Year. Also entitled, Granny D: Never Too Old To Raise A Little Hell.2003 Doris began a voter registration drive in 2003 targeting working women and minority voters in swing states and four months before election day in 2004 she became the Democratic nominee to the U.S. Senate from New Hampshire and managed to capture 34% of the vote.

You may want to check her website (grannyd.com) for news of her New England Reform School. You may want to send for a tee-shirt!

She is now 97 and has, this year, made several new speeches. We offer excerpts from one of them:
—Rosalie Paul
Wartburg College, Waverly Iowa

November 7, 2007
It’s wonderful to be here today at Wartburg, which I admire as one of America’s great liberal arts colleges. I would like to underline that word “liberal” in the context of liberal arts. It does not, of course, refer to big government, or to left-of-center politics. No, as I’m sure you know, it refers to the art of thinking freely—training the mind to think for itself, free of the lies and fantasies and prejudices that wrap around us from an early age.

In this time, the very idea of human life on the planet is at stake. War and violence have taken new and decidedly more dangerous turns.

So you are doing well to be freeing your minds right now. That is a difficult task, as there are so many forces around you, telling you what and how to think, and selling you incredible lies.

The War on Terrorism is a good example. It is a term used to keep you from thinking freely and from actually solving the world’s problems relating to poverty and freedom. If you solved those problems you would severely damage the profits of the elite.

The very idea that you can have war on terror is as silly as the idea that you can have war on anger. War itself is insane anger.

As the world’s resources become stressed by global warming and overpopulation, do we really think we can kill all the angry people? Can we calm them down by dropping bombs on their villages and spraying their families with machine gun bullets? Isn’t that rather like dropping gasoline and crumpled newspaper on forest fires instead of water? Do you think anyone really thinks it will work? They don’t even want it to work. War is too profitable. It is profitable for those who finance the careers of our politicians.

The “War on Terrorism,” has very little to do with anyone’s religious beliefs. Terrorism, historically, is a term used to describe what governments do to rule through fear—to overrule the rule of law. The term originated after the French Revolution as a tool for suppressing dissent. If we are to truly prosecute a War on Terrorism, it would include preventing governments from using fear to shred the democratic rule of law.

If you want to stop insane anger in the world, you have to get at world poverty and the injustices that people suffer as nations ruthlessly jockey for resources. Not only has our so-called government given away our basic human rights—turned them over to the terrorists in exchange for worthless hopes of safety—but they have subjected you and me to endless little indignities unbecoming American citizens, like making us take off our shoes at the airport. So you take off your shoes because one madman had an exploding shoe some years ago. I’m not sure which is worse: one possible tragedy like that, or the smell of a hundred million feet thereafter.

The point of this airport ceremony is to physically humiliate you into subservience to the new state. Get used to it, because it is just getting started—if you will let it.

If you are a psych major or have taken some psych courses, you understand that we often transfer to others the things we fear most within ourselves. When some leaders label others with words like terrorist, let them look first to what they are themselves doing in the world. Are they upholding the human rights encoded in the U.S. Constitution, and in the Geneva Convention, and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? If they are not, then they have forfeited their right to label other people in any disparaging way. Do they understand that 90% of the people who die in war are civilians, and that any pre-emptive, meaning non-provoked, war is by definition an act of terrorism?

To preserve prosperity in the world, agriculture and nature must be saved. The coal plants must be shut down—all of them—within the next few years. Gasoline-powered automobiles must be phased out in the next 10 years. International trade must be largely curtailed in favor of local production. These are the issues of a politics of love, and they cannot go forward without some free thinking and some knocking-down of immense lies now in place.

Free thinking, prosperity and kindness, intertwined, make cooperative living easier to achieve, and push intolerance away.

We have a lot of work to do, but, can you see it? Do you have a glimpse of it? Can you stand the idea of Googling a little more Noam Chomsky and a little less USA Today? That would be a good beginning.

Churchill was correct when he said the empires of the future are the empires of the mind. The big battle for the future is being fought right now in your mind. Your freedoms are closing in around you.

You have the power to save your freedoms and your natural world. Truth and Love, Courage and Energy, and a good organizing plan for cooperative action are your great powers. Don’t look for leaders to do it for you, unless you are standing before a mirror.

I’m 97, soon 98, so saying ‘good luck’ is about all I have left. I have filled my life with adventures and good causes. They have not been enough for the world, and they have not even been enough for me. But I shudder to think of how bare my life would have been had I not answered the call to action, the call that you must now be feeling somewhere in your hearts.