Writing My Representative

A few weeks ago, when I wrote a blog article on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, I ended by imploring my audience to 'join me' in contacting our congressional representatives to express our disapproval of the bill. This was, quite honestly, a pretty dishonest way to end the article.

I had no idea who my representative was, not to mention how to contact him/her. I've later reflected that it's a total crime that I graduated high school, let alone college, without this information. Shouldn't there have been a civic engagement class (or one-hour lecture, at least) somewhere in my sixteen years of education? But no. I was clueless.

And there may be a lot of structural reasons for my cluelessness, but remaining there even as I asked people to advocate 'with me' was a choice made out of laziness and lack of dedication to this issue. And that kind of hypocrisy can really weigh on a person.

So today, I overcame 21 years of ignorance with a 15-second google search. Don't you love the modern world? You don't know who your congressional representative is, so you type, “Who's my congressional representative?” into a little digital illusion of a box, and voila! A House.Gov zip code search page pops up, hooking up with the webpage of your man (or woman) just as fast as you can think about it.

As a resident of Riverside County, CA, my representative is Ken Calvert. He's a Republican with a giggle-ably outdated picture of himself across the banner of his website. From the mini-snippets I've read so far, I probably wouldn't agree with his stances on a lot of things, but he seems like a decent guy. I'm glad I looked him up.

In the spirit of honesty, though, I'm really not a phone person. I'm not super articulate 'on the fly'. So instead of calling him about the TPP, I wrote him a letter. I tried to talk about the issue just as one person talking to another-- letting all personality show through, from my kindergarten-teacher-looking handwriting and vintage daisy stationary to the vocabulary and conversational pace of my writing.

Just one person who cares talking to another person who cares. This is how I signed it:

From an average ordinary everyday supercitizen,

~Ely