What personal freedom is next?

[Doc]

So you are recommending apathy???    For those of us who lack the convenience of a few extra thousand or hundred thousand dollars?  :blink:

This piece of advice sounds just as useful as your first suggestion - all going to the White House lawn for a smoke-in.&nbsp; &nbsp; <_<

Letters can and do make a difference.&nbsp; Politicians have a rule-of-thumb they apply to 'snail-mail' letters.&nbsp; For every individual one they receive, they assume that there are multiples of that opinion in their constituency.&nbsp; They pay less attention to signatures on form letters than they do to individual letters.&nbsp; &nbsp; Further, they like to know that there is sufficient support in their constituency for any changes they might make before they act.&nbsp; &nbsp; Politicians, much as they would love to call themselves visionary leaders, tend to follow the crowd, not lead it.
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Bah humbug I say.

I have seen what happens to those letters.

Most of them never even opened. Just thrown out. There was even a really good expose on it some time ago for an online federalist magazine. Bags and bags of unopened letters to elected officials, found in the dump.

I do not recommend apathy. I recommend action. Hard action if need be.

Shadow, as much as I hate to say it, the Golden Rule Exists. He who has the gold makes the rules. Unless some God awful horrible traumatic event happens that the media covers for the common folk, and it becomes a hot seat issue for those wanting a little support for reelection, most voices are never heard.

That is not to say that letter writing does not have it place. In the smaller ponds of politics, with swamped understaffed up and comings, you can mail bomb the crap out of them with a well organised mail campaign. Nothing, and I mean nothing bogs down some small two bit penny ante politician like being buried under several tons of mail.

Special interest groups are yanking on your elected official's strings. That's how it is. That's how those men and women stay in office. There are aristocracies in the US government. And these expensive empires are fueled by wealth. Look at Strom Thurmond. No longer here, but his legacy lives on. Ted Kennedy. Entire families. You think your common as dirt day to day living in "poor and wretched squallour" means jack to them? Better yet, think your votes even matter? You live in Canada Shadow, so this might not apply much to you. But for us living in the states, this is reality, plain and simple. People like Strom didn't stay in power because people voted for him... He stayed in power through his own means. He gave certain groups what they wanted, and, in return, they made sure their frontman stayed in the front.

Mary Jane is a public boogeyman. It gives the fatasses a whipping boy to fall back on when there's nothing else to scare the public or bring them in line with. It is, at best, a distraction, and one the media favours highly, and a frequent wildcard that gets brought up when the US gov wants to turn your attention from something else, usually something it botched. Like say, not finding Osama or prison abuse scandals.

It's wagging the dog.

Woof woof.