Correspondence Clearinghouse (Volume 1)

Good evening and welcome to a first edition of a nice little place to reprint letters you have sent to elected officials, media outlets, bureaucracies and fellow activist. You could really place anything here or even ask for help with a letter your are trying to compose.

I don't know how many will agree but I feel that most letters we send to elected officials just generate a form letter and nothing more. A reprint here and a reply from fellow concerned citizens may just make those letter seem a bit less ephemeral.

Mostly this diary is about an exchange of ideas and a place to preserve the letters we have sent. This is an action page since seeing the letters of others can inspire more letters. I can't think of a better place to receive an intelligent responses than here.  

Perhaps you've sent a letter to your local newspaper and you would like input form your fellow Kossacks. If the newspaper printed the letter then include a link. If it got passed over then this is your second chance.

I don't know how popular this series will be but it will be here every Monday. If you have an action that you would like placed in this little soapbox, just forward your correspondence and an explanation to;

ActionThoughts(at)gmail(dot)com

There have been correspondence clearinghouses around for a long time. Long ago grass roots organizations would collect letters so politicians couldn't claim that they were an isolated group. I've preferred writing to my elected officials through The People's Email Network for years because at least there I can find that letter and a tabulation of how many people are interested in the same changes.

This could be an improvement over those many action pages because of community. Here your letter can create a discussion. Come here to post what you've asked your elected official for lately and you may at least get some mojo out of it. Someone may offer an improvement or bring up another point to justify the letter on any of the many issue that so many of us have in common.

How many can you think of that have almost unanimous support around here and get ignored by both the media and congress? There is health care reform, impeachment, civil rights, and campaign finance reform for starters. We all have issues and I could use this diary as a soapbox for one in particular but seeing how this is the first, I'll leave a clean slate for you to offer what you may be writing about.

Setting my issues aside there are a few letters worth thinking about. Have you ever sent a letter of support to soldiers in Iraq? Besides the effort to get care packages to the troops, one of our own jlms qkw often writes diaries promoting letters to the soldiers in Iraq. You can just send it to jlms qkw and she will take it from there.

There are many people here trying to do good things but I'm sure that many here feel that when we contact people who are charged with doing the right thing, we have reached people that are determined to do nothing. Those letters that come from voters should be very important in a representative government but often get so little respect.

That frustration would be another reason to justify this sort of weekly. Action diaries, the type that call for letter writing, often die rather quickly at Daily Kos. Perhaps because of experience, many don't get too enthusiastic about asking elected officials to do something and that diary you worked so hard on can have a little second life here.

So what have you written lately and how was it received? I'm sure that a few letter have been written from members of this community to The New Yorker recently. Feel free to post them here too but if any diary or blog piece anywhere inspired you to write to an elected official or a media source than please post a link to the piece that inspired you and a copy of the letter you sent. Of course it doesn't need to be new. Have you ever written any letter that you want everyone to see or perhaps a letter that got something accomplished?