Bruce Bair, 73, was just a few miles outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, when I called him up on a recent Tuesday.
“Is now a good time to talk?” I asked. “Well, I’m just walking,” he said happily.
Bair was about a week into his roughly 300-mile trek from Durham to Washington, D.C., to deliver dozens of letters to North Carolina’s congressional representatives. From Charlottesville, he still had over a week of walking more than 100 remaining miles.
Bair is a grandpa and a veteran. He told me that he’d hoped to be able to sit down with Senator Thom Tillis but that he might only be able to score a meeting with his chief of staff. Ted Budd, the state’s other senator, didn’t respond at all. (Since chatting with Bair, he’s made it to D.C. and did in fact meet with Tillis’s chief of staff.)
This spring, we’ve interviewed a woman who spends her afternoons alone on a street corner with protest signs, a musician who wrote a semi-satirical album of political action songs, and locals who attended recent “No Kings” protests. They’re all seeing an America they’re not proud of (see: brutal immigration enforcement, the gutting of the federal workforce, and the neverending First Family grift) and they’re trying to do something about it. All of them, including Bair, hope that they can inspire others to take some action, no matter how small.
We asked Bair about his journey and destination as he hoofed his way toward the nation’s capital.
INDY: Why the walk?
Bair: I’m a veteran of the 25th Infantry and other units. And we fought. There was no peaceful resolution back when I was in the army. We shot people.
One of my daughters accused me one day of always thinking of the violent way first, and that made me think about myself—what kind of an impression am I giving to my grandkids? So I started studying nonviolent resistance, and, of course, the three big guys are Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela. This is what they did, they walked, they gathered followers. So I gathered letters.
My deal is to show resistance to these political philosophies that are hurting our country and will hurt my grandchildren and hurt people like you.
Tell me about a typical day of walking.
Sore feet, sore back. I get up at six a.m., and I walk until I put in between 14 and 20 miles, depending on what the plan is for the day.
Today I’m staying in a hotel in some little, tiny town that happens to have a Holiday Inn Express. Yesterday I walked until I got to the house of the people who were sponsoring me in Charlottesville. It’s 300 miles total and I got 15 days, so I gotta make 20 miles a day.
Has anything, besides maybe the sore feet, surprised you about the walk so far?
How wonderful most people really are. Since June 2, I’ve had probably 15 or 20 people stop to ask if I was OK, do I need money, could they give me a lift, could they give me food. You know, that kind of stuff is just what makes me ignore my sore feet.
And how can people help?
Well, they can call their representatives. Go to Fivecalls.org. They should call their state reps, they should call their county council members, and they should call their people in Congress.
You can also do phone banking, you can do postcards. Those are all very, very safe things. You can do them inside your house, inside your car. You don’t have to get out on the street.
But I think if you’re old like me, you know, we should be the front line. If somebody’s gonna get cracked on the head it should be us. These young people should be behind us, and they should be doing these other things. We should stand up. They should get out on the bridges, on the street corners, and they should express their views, and they’ll be surprised at how many people will agree with them, because people on both sides are agreed: You should have a place to live, you should have food to eat. You should have health care, you should have an education, you should make a contribution to this country through your work and raising a family.
And nobody on either side disagrees with that except the politicians who want money.
There’s a lot to be upset about, locally and nationally. Were there any specific developments that pushed you into something as big as this walk?
I have 10 grandchildren. And I hadn’t done anything except vote and write letters to the editor.
And I told my wife that if we don’t do something now, there’ll be nothing to do something about, that this whole country would be run by corporations, and corporations will be able to turn you into diesel fuel if they don’t think you’re useful.
Have you spoken to your grandchildren on the walk? What are you hearing from them?
They’re teenagers and in their early twenties, and they’re very, very supportive. I make little videos and I get little hearts and flowers and thumbs-ups from them.
What are the letters you’re carrying?
I set up an email, [email protected], and said, “Send me a letter for Tillis, Budd, [U.S. Representative Valerie] Foushee, whoever you want to deliver to, and I’ll take it in my backpack.” So I printed them out and put them in plastic bags. I think there’s about 50 of them right now, there may be a few left that I’ve got to print.
What do you hope people who see you walking, or hear about your walk, take away from it?
That they do something. That they can’t be idle. They have to do something. The least little thing combines with everything else. My goal is to get people to say “Yeah I could do this little thing,” and then do it. Once they’ve done that, when the next little thing comes up, they’re going to say, “Yeah, I’m going to do that,” and it will build.
We need 12 or 15 million people with that kind of attitude.
Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].