What wild possibility might you seek to achieve by your 90th year?
Hello to you listening in Dublin, New Hampshire!
Coming to you from Whidbey Island, Washington this is Stories From Women Who Walk with 60 Seconds (and a bit more) for Story Prompt Friday and your host, Diane Wyzga.
Imagine this: It’s February 1998. You are 89 years old. You have arthritis and emphysema. You live in a small town in New Hampshire. You laid to rest your husband of 65 years after caring for him with Alzheimer’s the last 10 years of his life. Your best friend of 50 years has also died. Now what, asks your son? What will you do?
I have an idea, you say. Money is the big divider between people and politics. The tycoons with the money are buying the politicians and making all the decisions. Someone has to tell the American people about the need for national campaign finance reform. I can do that. How, your son wants to know.
I’ll go on a walk. And so she begins getting in shape walking 2 miles a day, 5 miles a day, 10 miles a day, and carrying a backpack. After 7 months she declares herself ready to go on a walk and tells her son she is starting in Los Angeles, California.
After collecting petitions on a beach in Los Angeles Doris Haddock, a.k.a. Granny D begins 14-month walk across America through California, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Arkansas and on up to Washington, DC. She has no GoFundMe account or any real plan except to get out and talk to as many people as she can about the need for campaign finance reform.
My friend Granny D eats with the people she walks with along the way, sleeps in a spare bedroom, on a couch or in a church basement. She gives talks about national campaign finance reform at rodeos, county fairs, schools, and local gatherings. 10 miles a day, every day, walking across America in her 90th year.
By the time Granny D arrives in Washington, DC a blizzard has blocked traffic so she cross-country skies to the Capital to meet then Senators McCain & Feingold who sponsored the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act which will become law 2 years later in 2002. The primary purpose of the Act was to eliminate the increased use of so-called soft money to fund advertising by political parties on behalf of their candidates.
Of her walk Granny D always had her doubts; but she persisted. Here we are 25 years later and deeper in soft-money shit than she could have imagined thanks to the bought and paid for SCOTUS decision in Citizens United that equated money with free speech, kicked open the floodgates to a tsunami of dark money, and tilted political influence toward wealthy donors tycoons, and corporations.
I knew Granny D, we wrote letters back and forth. Sometimes I wonder: What was the point? What difference did 14 months of walking and talking do? I’ll tell you. It did this: I’m still talking about her and the wild possibility that she actually realized. She was one Ordinary Person who took up a cause she believed in, talked to thousands of people as she walked across America in her 90th year and kept on talking until she died at the age of 100. Like every good story Granny D lives on to inspire, motivate, and remind each of us - young and old - what we are capable of, what we can achieve before and even after our 90th year.
Yes! we are Ordinary Persons standing shoulder to shoulder with other Ordinary Persons drawn together like filings to a magnet building an Army of Ordinary Persons to Free America, unbalance the status quo, and create a Citizen’s Future of hope, dignity, and inclusion. We are the stories of light we struggle to write in these dark times and will be proud to share with those we leave behind when we walk on.
Story Prompt: Who are you? What is your declaration of wild possibility? How are you shaping the future for good? Write that story!
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Stories From Women Who Walk Production Team
Podcaster: Diane F Wyzga & Quarter Moon Story Arts
Music: Mer’s Waltz from Crossing the Waters by Steve Schuch & Night Heron Music
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