Wanted: allies in love

Thank god for the Raging Grannies, thank god for the old crones who won’t shut the hell up. There’s Doris “Granny D.” Haddock, who spoke in Hood River, Oregon, on August 16, 2003, A Small Group of Dedicated People Might Actually Do Something, to name the two politics possible in today’s world: the politics of fear and the politics of love. Read the whole article for a succinct history lesson. This excerpt is the closing plea:

The Libertarians are our new and brave allies in the defending of the Bill of Rights from Bush’s anti-American attacks through his henchmen Ashcroft and Ridge. But our friends the Libertarians would have us do away with most all of our government. Anyone who has paid too many taxes or dealt with too many rude and overly powerful bureaucrats understands the Libertarian’s feelings, but I ask at least the intellectually honest Libertarians – and there are many of them – to wisely see that government, which is indeed a system of restraint – must be matched in strength and scale to the corporate monstrosities that now have the ability and the willingness to destroy us – to blow up the entire Appalachian Range for the profits of coal, for example, as is now happening – or to steal for profit the water supply of whole regions, or to enslave whole regions at low wages rather than allow fair trade. Or to move every one of our good jobs overseas. These inhuman and inhumane organizations are stealing our lives and all nature around us.

Only government is large enough and powerful enough to reign in the corporations whose cold heartedness trades lives for profits all over the world. Republican Teddy Roosevelt began the buildup of big government solely to protect us from overlarge corporations so that they might not overwhelm us human beings. In doing so, he created a split in the Republican Party, and big business interests won. Perhaps the rational solution is to scale them both back – corporations and government – and let individual enterprise and individual freedom, and its many middle class treasures and blessings, blossom in the old battlefield. But there is no leadership for that, and governments are being stripped of all regulatory powers by the false religion of a new deity, the unfettered, liberated market. So, no longer protected by governments, we must fight the battle that is before us: human beings versus monstrous corporations and their bodysnatched government puppets. It is a battle of human scale versus monstrous scale, love versus fear.

Visit her website Granny D. for more. Here in British Columbia, a neoliberal (colonialist) heaven courtesy of Gordon Campbell and gang, we also have warrior crones young and old, fighting for what’s right: Betty Krawczyk and the Women in the Woods. They give the ad slogan “no fear” its true meaning back.