Doris Haddock's Remarks in the Shenendoah Valley
Heartwood Conference, May 29, 2004
Thank you.
Last October I began a journey to encourage people to register and to vote. My travels have taken me through most of the states east of the Mississippi and over 20,000 miles. My trek has been nonpartisan, but today is my day off and I will speak more plainly.
Along the way it has been my pleasure to see glimpses of the next America emerging from the pain and exploitation of the present toxic and unsustainable order--now wobbling toward its fall.
Certainly Mr. Bush has done all he can to speed the demise of the old order and to lay bare the issues and the competing forces at work in the world. As he has undermined America's position in the world and America's security, he has also set the stage for the economic collapse of the American economy--now propped up only by dwindling foreign investment. We do not take joy in that coming crash, but we can look joyfully to the new life that will come forth in the spring--the emergence of the natural human economy, long suppressed by the joyless self-colonization by corporations--corporations that, during the deregulations and corporate raiding of the Reagan administration, became community-destroying Frankenstein monsters. For every hundred dollars now earned by the average American worker lucky enough to have a job, the top CEOs make $30,000. That's a 300-to-one wealth gap that has put the advance of the American dream into the deep freeze.
It is a winter that will thaw.
I had a glimpse of that new American spring the other evening in downtown Asheville. I was walking down the street when I came upon a small urban square called Pritchard Park. The sky was cool and starry. A new moon sat atop an old building across the square--it sat next to the horn of an old civil defense siren up there. In the square were about twenty drummers drumming--all kinds of drums making a great and pleasant rhythm for the town. Near the drummers were about a dozen young people playing hacky-sack--tossing around a little beanbag with their feet and knees. They were amazingly talented. There were about six younger children with hula-hoops, and some middle-age people dancing.
Asheville is a creative town. Its police department has a poor reputation as repressive, but the people are awake and alive. The arts are thriving, a natural economy of local produce, local music is thriving, as are locally-owned businesses. If you go to Starbucks, you will see progressive volunteers in front of the store, handing out free cups of fair-trade coffee to satisfy your coffee craving without your having to go inside and do business with the enemy. There is a joyfulness to the town and to life in such places. I have visited many such communities and seen the gardens, the home industries, the recycling ethics, the sense of social fairness that thrives in such places. These are the opening points of the next America. It is so clear that neither the Republican or Democrat party represents these people--you can almost understand their reluctance to participate and vote in the ethically corrupt system.
Before I left Asheville I stood on a street corner with a North Carolina soldier named Jimmy Massey, and with a group citizens organized by Veterans for Peace. As they did in Detroit, the passing cars and trucks honked in approval for ending this war that is morally so over. Jimmy left the Marine Corps, the love of his life, because he would not participate in the continued slaughter of innocent civilians in Iraq. He had done it, and he had had enough. He is a big fellow, with a great honest and friendly face that makes the poignancy of what this government asked him to do all the more wrenching. Very simply, he is a good American and his commander in chief is not. He came back because he is morally strong enough to know that Americans must not become storm troopers for the oil companies and their captive politicians. He is part of the awakening America, the new country that we are hatching from within.
Oh, how we Americans who are awake and alive are discouraged to find ourselves on the wrong side of justice and peace in the world. How sad we are to not be the bright nation that brings environmental sanity and health and nourishment, and the freedom and prosperity of self-sufficiency to the world. How tragic to know that, by losing control of our government, by losing control to the corporate interests that now control our government, we have unleashed such evil in the world.
It hurts to know that we are exporting torture and injustice and incredible environmental and cultural devastation in the world. It hurts to know that the same forces are at work in our own country, tearing down our mountains for cheap coal that is not cheap at all if you count the cost of a lost environment. Those forces are also stealing our water from our farms and towns so that it can be sold back to us in bottles, because the rest of the water is too polluted to drink, turning our children into hypnotized consumer robots, controlled by orchestrated fears and nurtured ignorance.
But, as I say, this is the toppling regime, the garmentless king, the dry and cracked skin of the old elitist order, out of which a new and green America is emerging, and away from which the morally strongest of our soldiers are already coming home.
In a town north of Detroit they are building a community radio station. It will operate outside the law, as Clearchannel has all the frequencies bought up and will not provide any useful community news. Pirate broadcasting is not new, but in this instance the city council and the mayor are backing the station. It is an uprising of sorts.
Uprising is in the air: over 235 cities and towns have passed resolution defying Ashcroft's very un-American Patriot Act. (The simple thing about the Bush Administration is that you can easily tell what his new laws are about if you put the word "not" after their titles.)
In another town closer to downtown Detroit, Highland Park, the old order is seen in its nakedness. Chrysler Corporation pulled out, taking millions in public money with them. The town was left in bankruptcy. The conservative former governor sent in a special manager to take over the town. She is a fan of privatization, and has hired, at huge salaries, her privatization pals. The elected city council now has no power and often must meet at a McDonalds because the little corporate dictator will not let them meet in city hall. She is arranging to sell the city's water utility to a giant international water company. They will not have to bid for the purchase, and they will not have to put any money down. So corporations have colonized Highland Park and destroyed democracy there. Violence may ensue. Or the community may decide to stop exporting its money and start building a natural economy--a post industrial, post-colonial economy. It begins with shopping only at locally-owned businesses and starting up the gardens and markets that will nurture the growth of a new middle class. We must be like Gandhi, refusing to wear English garments made from India's cotton, when India can very well make its own cloth. And education must be revolutionized as well, for there is no lasting freedom without widespread higher education. I have walked and registered voters in the Jeffries Housing Project of Detroit and Cabrini Green in Chicago and in the streets of Highland Park, and I have met so many people ready for the new America. The prison culture is not working. People will not forever stand for it.
"Live Free or Die!" is painted across the back of my truck. People everywhere are preparing themselves for a great change in this land. They have had enough and are ready to render powerless the powerful and bring justice where there is now only unfairness and exploitation. A natural economy will rise. We need not import chairs from halfway around the world if a woodworker in our own community is out of work. We need no preserved or mutant foods from afar when we can have fresh and natural foods from our neighborhoods. Our children need not to eat junk foods in school cafeterias when they have unused playgrounds that could grow a botany class and a good lunch--and this is happening, too. Creative disengagement from the old order; creative engagement with each other and with the processes of life.
I am not advocating a return to simpler times: indeed it is simpler to eat a Happy Meal at McDonalds than to have a community pot luck feast. I am suggesting a return to real life in all its richness. And I am not suggesting that we build walls or forgo trade with other nations: Communities can trade their specialties with each other, as can regions and nations, but we need not go overboard with the concept. It is not rational to trade for what our own unemployed people can easily make here at home, and any savings we realize in trading with slave societies are soon lost as we lose our middle class and become a slave society ourselves.
While we build a new America from the rich soil of our own hearts and neighborhoods, we must work also from the other end: We need local, state and national leadership that will help transform the American way of life to something closer to our national dream, and something closer to a sustainable vision of responsible life to the seventh generation. I don't look for many those leader to be on our ballots just yet, but we will prepare the market for them by growing the progressive vote, and we will raise our young people to become those responsible leaders.
In this year, the future goes both ways for America: toward a long dark night, or toward the opportunity for a new beginning. We owe it to the world to clean up our act; we owe it to ourselves to rid ourselves of the exploitive commercial, governmental and military institutions that do not protect and serve us, but endanger and harm us. It is a revolution of the heart, and I see it welling up in a million hearts. Eyes are moist at the thought of it.
We have work to do in the coming months. We have to help educate America's voters, for they will not get good information any other way. We must reproduce the best news clippings about what is going on in America and in the world, and get them handed out in every neighborhood and at every bus and subway station. I would like to encourage Common Dreams, Truthout, Alternet and the Indy Media outlets to generate many such fliers that can be downloaded and copied by thousands of volunteers, acting alone or through organizations. Let us counter Fox News with a kind of Coyote News of our own. Let us get the truth to the American people so that they can vote wisely.
The second thing we must do is to get our friends and the people in our towns to register and to vote. We must take responsibility for our neighborhoods and workplaces. We should host election night parties--Landslide parties--and send out the invitations now, followed by calls and fliers about the issues and about how to register and get to the polls. Acts of personal leadership are essential this year.
Third, we must deal with that part of ourselves that is the selfish progressive, capable of doing more harm than good in the coming months.
We are the selfish progressives when we think it is all about us. We require the perfect candidate who reflects our views precisely. If we cannot have such a candidate, we may not vote, or we may vote for someone who cannot win, just to show our support for our precious opinions. This grandstanding is more important to us than the lives of all the people who will die and be exploited if a fascist warmonger is elected because of our selfish narcissism.
The old joke is that the left forms its firing squad in a circle. The truth of that is in the selfish progressive's belief that politics is not for the practical advance of the common good, but is a showcase for personal sentiments. Progressive meetings take forever as all of us must fully expound our views on everything. It is such a bore when other people speak, and so wonderfully enlightening when we finally get a few hours to speak ourselves. It is, in other words, a monumentally selfish exercise much of the time.
I hope the Nader candidacy is not to become a meeting ground for such narcissism at the expense of other people's lives.
I am concerned about the future of the Green Party. My friends in the Greens tell me that they are building a party and that they must look to the long view. If they are right, here is the long view: ten to twenty years of party growth, during which the left vote will be split and the right wing will have the institutions of government all to themselves. Another ten to twenty years of equality between the Greens and the Dems, during which the right wing will have another era of unchallenged power. Then ten to twenty years when the Greens outpace the Dems, but the Dems are still a factor and the progressive vote is still split. So, say, thirty to sixty years before they can see some victories. Will there be anything like justice and liberty and nature left to work with by that time?
Do the Greens have a better scenario to meet the real and present danger to the planet? I do: let the progressives take over the Democratic party, whose doors are unlocked and whose halls are unguarded. That can be done in two to four years. If the energies of the Green Party were transferred to a Green Caucus within the Democratic Party, real progress would be possible quickly.
It is time for the factions of the left to understand that, unless they have a practical strategy for early victory, they stand in the way of justice, of environmental protection, and of peace if they continue to split the progressive vote. If they can actually win elections in some areas, that is a different matter, of course.
If any fellow progressives are in the game only to hear themselves pontificate and wax eloquent about their wonderful values and their brilliant grasp of the issues--while others starve and die, I ask them to join Toastmasters where they can learn to make shorter, less boring speeches and also do no harm in the world. Politics is not about posturing, but about winning and losing and representing the interests of millions of people. When you take up the sword of politics, you play to win on behalf of your people, not to look pretty in your uniform.
That same narcissism that we of the left are particularly prone to, by the way, may be on display in the convention cities this summer. Millions of television viewers trying to decide whether or not to jump ship from the incumbent will look at the mess on the streets in Boston and New York and say, well, if I have to choose sides, I know I'm not on theirs. The conventions are a time for massive action, but it had better be well organized and designed to convey real information respectfully to the American people, or it will be a selfish and damaging exercise in adult play at the expense of thousands of lives and the environment. I urge those non-delegates going to the conventions to carry thoughtful signs designed not to show only their anger, but the truth. I urge young people to consider the conventions not as an opportunity for mayhem and fun, but for service to their country and their world by using their creativity to open, not close, the hearts of the millions of Americans who will be watching. Let's look good out there. It is not in protesting alone that we find our power, but in creating change in the hearts and minds of millions of Americans. We have the power to do this, because the facts are on our side and because most Americans do care about the air, water, forests and mountains of their world, and most Americans do not side with corruption and exploitation and greed. We can only enlarge our tent by attracting people into it through our earnestness and our ability to admirably represent truth and love.
So I come to this conference full of the greenest of Greens to make my suggestions among friends.
We all know that this election is the most important election of our lives. It is a time indeed for our patriotism, our love and our strength of will. Our mountains depend on what we do. Our air and water. Our children and their children. The people of the world. Nature itself is, like no other time, in the balance. It is not a time for circular firing squads or childish (if satisfying) displays of anarchy. It is a time for the grand majority of Americans to be proud of each other for rising up at a time of crisis and doing the right thing.
And after the election, from the slums of Tampa to the sad towers of Cabrini Green, and from the co-ops of Asheville to Madison, Austin, Ann Arbor, Gainesville, and the ten thousand other American communities of people reawakening to life, we have a new America to nurture and an old America to begin putting away.
Thank you.