Chain Letter to the President

Dear Mr. President,

Here’s what I’m thinking. Without the prospect of a future election you could finally do the right thing for America and the world and be worthy of that Nobel Peace Prize. Or you could continue down the path to tyranny. My bet’s on the latter unless there’s enough pressure from We the People to counteract the 1% and the permanent political class. Without pressure, nothing will change; you’ll continue protecting the 1%, amassing dictatorial power, building the largest security state in history, and institutionalizing war crimes and crimes against humanity (every drone strike is a war crime and continuing to ignore global warming and poverty is a crime against humanity). So what can we do? Personally, I write letters—124 in the past 164 days, 224 since December 3, 2010. I received 16 responses from The White House, none of which amount to a hill of beans. I know you haven’t personally read a single one since they’re not heart-tuggers or atta’ boys that your staff cherry-picks for you to read (10 letters a day from the 65,000 a week you receive). Writing letters isn’t exactly activism, not like getting out in the street and putting your body on the line, but it is a form of protest and writers are important to revolution too. So I thought, What would the effect be if 100 people started writing 5 letters a week and they each recruited 5 new people to write 5 letters a week, and those recruits in turn recruited 5 more and so on. In a short time you’d be getting swamped with more than a million letters a week and that might catch someone’s notice. It might even cause you to start paying attention to the real problems like poverty and inequality and global warming and stop the drone strikes and extrajudicial assassinations. Or… you could just order the mail to go straight to the incinerator, call out the security forces: the FBI, Homeland Security the DEA and all the rest of the enforcers, declare a state of national security emergency and round up all the letter writers, label us terrorists and imminent threats and detain us indefinitely. You do have the power now, Mr. President. Even though letter writing is a mild form of peaceful protest, it could inspire others, maybe even restart the Occupy movement. Who knows what might result? Maybe we’d get our country back, our democracy back, our Constitution back. At the very least it would help save the US Postal Service. It’s worth a shot. You never know where the spark for revolution comes from.