Letters

 

You would be amazed by two things if you had the chance to comb through the correspondence records of a member of the US House of Representatives.  I recently had the chance to look at a sampling (about a dozen boxes) from the total collection of a few hundred boxes, all containing the letters sent to a very important former Representative.

 

Here were my observations...

 

1 - Scores and scores of letters, probably a third of what I saw, were never opened.  Staffers must have been too busy or judged from the return address that the letters were not important enough to open and read.  The ones which did get opened were the ones sent in Express mail or FedEx packets.  So much for writing your Congressman. 

 

2 - The number of crackpots and weirdos who write to government officials is massive.  I read multiple letters from absolute crazies who sent long incoherent letters to the Representative.  I am not talking about the many, many letters that contain crappy spelling and grammar, nor am I referring to the letters which are less than well thought-out.  I mean legitimately insane people sending notes to elected officials.  Really interesting stuff.

 

It brings back memories of my time as Legislative Aide to the GA Speaker Pro Tempore in 2007.  It was that experience that destroyed my dreams of working in politics.  The truth is...our country is run by lobbyists and those lobbyists are employed by big business and large non-profits.  The input that regular citizens give to elected leaders (other than the vote itself) is largely irrelevant.  Very sad.

 

But I guess that I can take comfort from some of the wacky letters I saw...they tell me that the end is near.  It will be nice to live in a government ruled by Christ on a new Earth where our ruler not only listens to us, but he loves us so much that he is willing to (and did) die for us.