Please send physical letters too!
Plenty of people way smarter than me have spoken at length about how much policy (and demanding a recount/investigation is policy!) can be shaped by like. A few actual physical letters & some phone calls.
Emails are the ultimate ephemera. Emailing is great, inbox number go up, but it's just number go brrrrr.
Imagine you're a White House staffer, and you get to work next week, and instead of the usual handful of letters from schoolchildren doing a class project (cute!) you have a rubberbanded stack of envelopes two inches thick on your desk. Now imagine the next day it's four inches. Now imagine the next day they bring a white USPS tote in. If you've never seen a white USPS tote, it's a bin the size of an old-school residential recycling bin made of translucent white corrugated plastic with black USPS Official Use labeling stamped all over it. Now imagine you've got one of those, when you never had one of those in all 3.8 years you've held this position. And now imagine the next day it's two totes and a sack (USPS sacks being sized the size of an average American dorm laundry bag--THEY AIN'T SMALL, you could easily fit a kindergartener in there with room for their iPad).
And now imagine it doesn't stop, and your job (at the White House) is to open all this fucking mail because we have rules in this country, and one of the most major rules is you--White House peon guy--have to open all this fucking mail because every person's voice matters. You have to read all this fucking mail, so you can at least summarize to somebody else in that great machine what the hell the people are Contacting Corporate about.
Oh, and also the voicemail box is full, and the phone keeps ringing. You may have the ringer turned off, but the screen keeps lighting up. The lights on the lines keep blinking. Every call is going to voicemail at this point (you have other things to do, you have to read ALL THIS MAIL and also buy M&Ms for the candy drawer and apologize to whichever Secret Service agent Major has bitten this week and y'know. Do drafts & reports, and go to meetings, and many other such things. You have emails of your own. Maybe you have a kid who's also on notice for biting people [probably not Secret Service agents, but you never know] or an emergency root canal to get to or your sister's wedding coming up & you keep arguing back and forth about who's paying for the outfit you're required to wear in her photos for her wedding that you didn't even really wanna be in cuz you didn't have a great relationship growing up anyway [your parents are divorced & she learned from your mom the exact way to push all your buttons simultaneously in a way that always resulted in near-total psychological ruin] but you have to cuz otherwise you'll disappoint your gramma who's in the middle throes of Alzheimer's anyway so she probably wouldn't even notice or care but it's the principle of the thing and your gramma really raised you in the middle years of your parents' split & you remember her how she used to be & you never visit enough anyway [which you also feel bad about! it eats the corners off of you!] but you can't not respect her, y'know. It's why you go to church on Christmas Eve even though you're indifferent to religion yourself, because she wanted you to. And--oh shit, Christmas is coming up too, you have family visits to plan & maybe roommates to wrangle & maybe shared custody to fight over & gifts to buy & the gas bill's gonna go up now cuz you just had to turn the heat on but the weather won't make up its mind cuz we've fucked the planet and---oh god, the phone is ringing again)---and you have this stack of fucking mail to get through. This pile. A bin of unpretty, every day, average American handwriting to decipher. So you can make your summary report on the mail the President got today--which you also have to type up & forward!! there are meetings!!!!!--because the President has to listen to everybody.
The average American citizen does not write letters anymore--letter mail has been on a sharp & steady decline since the 90s. People who write letters are typically weirdos, freaks, people who have an overabundance of free time & some perverse psychological need to grip some form of stick in their hand and mash it into a piece of paper for twenty to forty minutes. Shit, the average American citizen rarely writes much of anything these days--handwriting instruction's been on an even-sharper and even-more-rapid decline.
The number in the email inbox goes brrrrrr. That's easy enough to ignore. You can ctrl + F in that later, and get a nice easy summary of how many times a word or approximations thereof appears over x number of emails you got this week.
Your desk is buried under fucking letters.
It does not have to be pretty, it does not have to look cute, just write what you were gonna say on a piece of paper too & chuck that bitch in the mail.
You can get a singular stamp at the Walmart service desk, most drugstores, the grocery store service desk, many gas stations & party stores (I hear some of y'all call those "bodegas" or "corner stores" where you're from), and of course the post office itself. If your post office has a self-serve kiosk you don't even have to talk to a person! You can just follow the options on the screen, pay with your card, & it will print you one singular stamp. Which you will then put in the upper-right-hand corner of your envelope & place in the slot for outgoing mail, or a blue mailbox anywhere you see one.
Done. Civic duty accomplished. White House staff's life made harder, because in a world where things have gone increasingly digital any unanticipated amount of paper absolutely FUCKS the workflow.
President Biden
c / o The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20500
(be sure to include your own address somewhere on your letter too, that's their rules)
And here's where you can call:
(202) 456-1111
TTY/TTD: (202) 456-6213
now go peform some democracy.
dailybridgerton
amandla
vaporwave
turnnoffyourmind
areudirty
gracieabrams
