Amidst all the tabloid voyeurism of an 80s hearthrob’s demise, you may have missed that Doris Haddock, the 90 year-old woman who walked across the country ten years ago to raise political enlightenment, died today at the age of 100.

Granny D was the quintessential embodiment of American ideals that have been nearly extinguished in this age of capitalist excess.  She remained politically active through the final weeks of her life and most recently proposed a constitutional amendment to strip corporations of personhood in the wake of the Citizens United travesty.

Would that we had thousands more like her in this world.

Doris “Granny D” Haddock
1910 – 2010 

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 a people who look to their children as the nation's greatest resource. 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.