Carrie Stone begins her journey to D.C. from Wallace, West Virginia
“If you are tired of waiting for politicians to fix what’s wrong & if you believe our policies are going in the WRONG direction, here is your chance to join with thousands of other Americans to DO something besides complain,” writes Carrie Stone, a 56-year-old gay grandmother and cancer survivor who has begun a 200-mile trek to D.C.
Stone started her walk from her hometown of Wallace, West Virginia on Sept. 26 and she’s scheduled to arrive in D.C. on Oct. 5. (You can follow her progress along the C&O Trail on Facebook, on Twitter @papercrete, and at her website.) She explained the significance of the timing of her arrival: “Beginning on Oct. 6, 2011, people are going to start occupying Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC. There we will stay indefinitely until something changes.”
“If I can do this, anybody can get in a car and do this,” Stone said in a phone conversation the day before her departure. “I want to inspire people to get involved. People think they’re too busy. I’m too busy, too… [but] this is so important. It’s more important than anything.”
When I reached out to Stone earlier this month, I didn’t know about her upcoming journey, or her past ones. Ever since TheFightBack began last year, I’ve had this idea to do a profile of our 500th Facebook friend.
The route from West Virginia to Washington DC
When we reached the milestone, I contacted the “lucky winner,” one Carrie Stone, and asked if I could interview her. “Sounds great,” she replied via Facebook. “My partner & I have quite the story to tell.” She wasn’t kidding.
In her second Facebook message, Stone laid out some of the life events that brought her to the decision to walk to D.C.
As for background info, Elisia & I are LGBT activists and have (officially) been involved in the struggle for equal legal rights for LGBT couples ever since Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. Shortly after DOMA was passed, we started Rainbow Law, a first of its kind legal document resource for our community. There we provide free advance directives and affordable document packages that allow partners to give each other rights and responsibilities that would otherwise be denied.
And because we understand these documents are very limited, our primary mission is to advocate for equal marriage rights for all LGBT Americans in every state. That is why we rode our bicycles across the country – twice – to advocate for marriage equality. We did so 1st in 2003 and again in 2004 while George Bush was pushing Congress to amend the Constitution to ban “gay marriage.” A documentary film called “Lesbian Grandmothers from Mars” was made and released right before the 2004 election. There is a trailer on YouTube. We are planning one more ride in 2013 – 10 years after the first ride.
After we ended the last ride we sold our house, quit our jobs and moved to West Virginia where we bought a small piece of land and started building a house out of recycled materials (builtfromtrash.com), like newspaper (papercrete), bottles, cans and tires.
We’ve just about finished the house and now have 4 goats, 6 chickens & 3 organic gardens. We are currently making our own solar panels (bought the parts on Ebay), a home-made windmill and a mini-hydroelectric generator. All of these (plus a generator made from an old stationary bike) are used to charge a bank of batteries so that we will eventually get off the power grid.
So, all of this sounds wonderful, right? Well, as it turns out, the oil & gas industry discovered we are living over top a mother lode of natural gas embedded in a layer of shale rock. Halliburton invented a wonderful way to extract that gas by hydraulic fracturing — in other words, by drilling down to and then horizontally through the shale and blasting it with a high pressure liquid which contains all sorts of toxins. Not only is this depleting local water supplies, it is causing methane gas to seep into the water wells AND it creates a toxic waste from the drilling fluid that is difficult to dispose of.
On top of all of that, as an uninsured cancer survivor, I struggle with no health care.
Needless to say, all of the above makes us almost a poster child for what ails this country today.
We had such hope when Obama was elected, but now see that we – the American people – need to take matters into our own hands. Our elected officials are clearly representing the 1% of the population who control the money while ignoring the other 99%. I may not be a mathematician but it is clear to me that – even if we get a fraction of people affected by these harmful policies (austerity measures, cutting education & government assistance, etc. while at the same time wasting billions in Iraq & Afghanistan and on giving welfare to wealthy corporations) – we will scare the sh** out of them.
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Oct. 6, Freedom Plaza May Feel a Bit Like Tahrir Square, 9/12/11