Waking Up the Vote

Doris "Granny D" Haddock, 94, is on a 15,000-mile voter registration trek through the swing states. The following is a speech she gave in Gainesville, Florida on March 7.

I am on a long trek across our beautiful country to see what one person and a few friends might do to engage more citizens in this democracy and to have them participate in the coming election in a way that will provide us with leadership that we will all have had a hand in selecting. That may seem like boring old politics, but it is much more than that, at least to me. And my journey is a great joy.

On the farms where I have stayed, and in the poorest corners of our poorest neighborhoods, I have met so many people who are kind and generous and full of dreams for their lives and for their community and for their country. It is heartbreaking sometimes to see how far their reality is from their dreams. Can I do anything to be of assistance? It is a simple question.

I am not an expert. I have no special university degrees or training that might suggest I have a role to play. And yet I do have a role to play, and so do we all. To be a citizen of the United States of America is a very big job but it takes no special qualifications other than a capacity for love and a determination to take your part.

In my travels, I have found communities waiting for ideas and leadership and hope. In the poorest communities of Tampa and Fort Myers and Miami I have met people who are alienated from our democracy. They live in another nation, almost. They long for respect, inclusion, prosperity, dignity. They search for it in their own way.

Remarkably, they have the power to bring great resources to their communities and their families if they would vote as a community -- not only for senators and presidents, but for city councilmen and county commissioners. Getting them to do that is like dragging someone from a gas-filled house: they are too overcome sometimes to do anything but lay down.

So we have, with the leadership of those areas, conceived ways to drag people into the fresh air where they might find their power over their own lives.

Let me tell you about one program we are building, called "Vote for Me."

It began when the young artist traveling with me put out poster boards and blank bumper stickers and crayons at a block fair in a poor neighborhood of Miami. She asked the kids to make a "Vote for Me" poster or bumper sticker. All were different and all were beautiful, creative, surprising. We presented these treasures to their parents with the message that the adults are indeed voting for their children when they vote, and that they are voting against them when they fail to vote. There are too many education, health, economic opportunity and justice issues in play to think that who we vote for does not affect our children's lives. It is a message that people instantly understand.

This idea connected with an idea that sprung up in Fort Myers. An African-American leader worried with us that all the coming voter registration programs will fall on deaf ears in the poorest neighborhoods, especially among the youngest voters. Even if they are registered, they will do on election day whatever their peers are doing. Few of us, at that age, are stronger than the tides of our peer group.

But, we thought, what if, when those young people were registered to vote, they were given a bracelet with the name of someone who gave their life for freedom or for equality -- someone who can no longer vote for themselves, but for whom the wearer of this bracelet might vote. The bracelet will come with the story of that person, and it will say, "Vote for Me." This emotional bond may become important enough to this new voter that he or she will break away from the normal activities of November 2, 2004 and show some respect for this name.