August 25, 2004
"A Fiercely Free People "
Speech at Robert Frost's Farm in Derry, New Hampshire
Doris "Granny D" Haddock: candidate for U.S. Senate from New Hampshire
Friday, August 20, 2004
Robert Frost is connected to that strong spiritual and ethical river that flows through Whitman and Hawthorne, Melville, Cather, Dickinson, Clemens, Wilder, Muir, Douglas, Foster, Gershwin, Joplin, Sousa, and the almost countless others who were charmed and inspired by the musical words of our Founding Fathers and of our great and eloquent Native American leaders.
And from these voices onward, up to our own time and through the eloquence of Bernstein, Cohen, Copland, Ellington, Martin Luther King, Jr., Capra, Ginsburg, Pete Seeger, Ansel Adams and so many others of the modern era's great minds and writers, an idea for who we are and who we want to be as Americans has been shaped in our hearts.
We want to be a just and honorable people, trustees of a beautiful land and gardeners of a great democracy. We want to be a fiercely free people -- good providers to each other and good neighbors to our townsmen and to the other people of the world.
This American spirit is an ideal that defines not only who we are to ourselves, but to the rest of the world in how they want to think of us. It is what they love about us, and they do.
And despite all our hard times, our wars, our depressions, our genocides, our suppressions and oppressions, our experience with slavery itself, we still stand at the edge of woods dark and deep with our future ahead of us and this dream still in our hearts. We still are perched at Half Dome Rock and along the grasses of the Hudson and the forests of the misty Olympic Peninsula and in the mud of the Mississippi at Hannibul. It is still a most beautiful country filled with most wonderful people. And we are still young.
Yet we have come to a new time. We and our natural world are poised now at a parting of the road. One path leads where powerful nations have gone before. It is the road of silver and blood -- the short, noisy road of empire. The other is a path no great nation has taken before. The only way we can take this less traveled road is to blow the ashes off the still living fire of our American Revolution -- where the people naturally rise against great and oppressive forces and reassert the human heart, human freedom and our highest values as a people.
The only way we can steer our ship of state on this new and unmarked path is if we have the wheel in our own hands, and that is what we are doing here today and in ten-thousand ways across our country, where patriots meet and plan against the new King George of a runaway government, hijacked by powerful economic interests who care nothing for all the things we care for.
It is a revolution and it may come to blows, though we look first and always for the peaceful way, as peace has more power by far when used rightly.
So, Mr. Frost. Here we are your countrymen come to your porch. You would not believe, Sir, what the powerful interests of this nation have done to your woods, your streams, your mountains, your people and their sons and daughters. Would you put down your pen and call us to other action?
Would you walk with me, Mr. Frost? For we are walking toward the democracy you helped dream for us. We are looking to pick it up wherever it is that we laid it down.
By the end of this new century, America will be a different place, depending on which road we take in this moment, in this coming election.
I could conjure up a fearful world for your imagining, where any who wish to speak out must do so in a barbed wire enclosure, and where the police organize to beat up and gas any of our children who stand up for justice and peace in the world -- but that is already here, of course, as we saw in Boston and Miami and shall see in New York. In Miami, fine children came to stand peaceably for justice in the world -- to argue for fair trade for the people of the world instead of exploitive trade. These young men and women -- and I know some of them and how fine they are -- were obeying the police. They tried to leave the area but were cut off and gassed and shot with wooden bullets that blinded and scarred some of them. They were rounded up into trucks, their belongings and identification were taken from them and left fluttering in the street so that they could not get out of jail or get home. This shame is upon the City of Miami, but it is on our society, too, as it moves toward a police state of repression of our civil liberties. That is the way it is now. And people, because they speak out peacefully, are visited by the federal police and told to watch what they say. This is what America has come to and is coming to in the shadow of dark leadership that cares nothing for the rights and values that so many Americans have died for.
I could conjure up an old grandmother who goes into the U.S. Capitol rotunda and recites from the Declaration of Independence, to urge the senators to free themselves from the special interests that bind them. I can imagine this old woman being handcuffed and arrested and jailed. I can imagine her coming back another time to read from the Bill of Rights itself, and again being shackled and jailed. But this time is already here, and this happened to me.
I can imagine people being held without recourse to lawyers or courts, endlessly in solitary confinement. This is here. I can imagine our country attacking a poor nation that never threatened us but had the bad luck to have one of the world's great oil reserves under its sands. This is here.
And so what is left to imagine down a dozen years or a half-century down this road? A ruined landscape? A broken spirit among the people? A fearful compliance in the machinery of death and not life? Other nations have gone that way. They end poorly. Their people suffer. The people of the world suffer. It gets worse and worse until the suffering is unbearable and the world reacts. Or is that upon us now, too?
Our safety as a nation is not something the current leaders of the American government seem to care anything about, or they would not be swatting hornets' nests in every corner of the violent world. They would bring calm and justice and prosperity to the world, for those are our only guarantees of security, and we have the power to bring those things to the world. These leaders care only to sell the guns and the Hum-Vees and the oil and the jet fighters and the airport bomb detectors and the insurance policies and the million products and services of a fear-based, waste-based, destruction-based, death-based economy. If we want peace, we are not going to get it from Mr. Bush or the Yes Men in Congress who vote with him at every turn. If we want our pursuit of happiness back, we will have to say enough to these career politicians who have sold us down the river and we must take on these offices ourselves, sending the lobbyists and their money away for a long time. There is, you know, a bribery bill that would put most of them in jail if it were enforced, and I shall like to look into that as a Senator.
You see what harsh words have come to my old American face. You see what harsh words we bring to your porch, Mr. Frost.
But we see the path you told us about, too, Dear Robert.
We see the one less traveled by great nations. I can imagine the end of this century quite differently. I imagine the great Appalachian Mountains in all their beauty, the coal operators long gone and the people again making a thousand good uses of the bounty of nature. I can imagine great arrays of solar cells and all the newer energy technology, harvesting the energy we need here at home from the natural processes of nature. I can imagine a people who look to their children as the nation's greatest resource, and they nurture them with an imaginative and engaging education and a perfection of health care. I can imagine a nation where the freedom and creativity of the people bloom in a daily display of great joy and abundance. I can imagine a political environment where there is still the great moving balance between the rights of the individual and the rights of the group. I can see the day when government has become much smaller, more the town hall, because great scale is no longer needed to keep check on the monstrously overscaled corporations that once terrorized the people and no giant machinery is needed to protect us from the mayhem we incite in the world. It is now the small government, the small business, the creative enterprise, the family-sized group that drives the economy so efficiently and profitably, and in balance with the natural surroundings. We will learn to do all that in this century, or we will die.
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I think we should choose life. I think we should choose leaders who will begin us on that path, and who will reject any allegiance to the economic special interests who now drive politics. So I have said "no" to all special interest PAC funds from the left, right or middle. I care not to receive any endorsements from any but the people themselves who know me and might have something to say for me.
It is a small revolution we are hatching here, but it is that. You can feel it everywhere. The people are so tired of this corrupt and dying system. You might say that, if we can't have a revolution, can't we please at least have Granny D? But the fact is, we have a real revolution. It began in 1776 and it has never ended. For as long as Americans have worked for justice and equality and fairness under the same sun; for as long as Americans have died for equality and respect and the right to pursue happiness for themselves and their families; for as long as Americans have taken up arms and fought around the world for liberty and justice and fairness and humanity, our revolution has kept its spin and its edge. We are some kind of special people in the world, and the world knows it very well. They look to us now to shake off this misdirection, this misleadership, this long nightmare. And look at us, world, for we are doing it.
Mr. Bush is a symbol of the old and very corrupt politics of the Washington-corporate elite. He puts a human face to Dwight Eisenhower's great warning to us. He is going down, and so are the Yes Men who have made his ruinous ride possible. That is why I am running, and that is why you must help me win. If the Senate hangs by one vote, then the Supreme Court hangs by that same vote. If we can hold the Senate, we can save the democracy. If it all goes down, we are on a path that none of us will prosper upon.
Let us do the thing that no great and powerful nation has done before. Let us take that less traveled path where might can be used as a force for justice and good and mass prosperity in the world. Let us understand that the course of history is at this moment in our hands.
And let us breathe this air of Mr. Frost's great America -- our America. This is our life. Let no one take our America or our joy from us. Let us not be its wage slaves or its credit indentures or its greeters. We are in revolt. We come at all these King Georges with our votes now and our hearts. And I know we -- our hands now upon the great wheel -- will move this great ship of ours toward the light. The future leads two ways: a long dark night or a brand new day. We can build the world of our dreams; Love is the key! Follow me friends, walk with me!
Thank you.