February 10, 2003
Things you can do (first of all: forget those pointless email chain-letter petitions)
Forget the email petitions
You've probably received some of them in the mail: email petitions forward from a friend that will, if enough people sign, keep a woman from being stoned to death in Africa, save women in Afghanistan, rescue PBS, get a prisoner released in the middle east, save the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge from pillage, u.s.w. The most recent was a petition against Bush's Iraq war ostensibly requested by the United Nations.
Just about none of these petitions is authentic, and most aren't even petitions—they're just pixilated chain letters. A bunch of names on a single email list are too easy to compile and even easier to delete. Most of them start as rumor and move to probability and from there to fact: A kid in South Jersey thinks it might be a good idea to send an anti-war petition to the UN and it soon morphs into a request from the UN for that selfsame petition.
Any time a friend sends you an email petition and you're tempted to sign on and, worse, pass it along to everyone on your email directory, you should first visit http://snopes.com , the web site that tells you which of these are authentic and which are just a web version of urban legends.
The only petitions you can be confident about are those that come from organizations you know and trust, sites that tell you who prepared the petitions and what is going to be done with then, such as MoveOn.org and PetitionOnline.com.
Use email where it will do some good
If you are moved by some issue, your voice will be far more effective if you simply send an email directly or telephone the people who might be impressed by a lot of mail. Friends in Congress back in the days when this sort of thing was done with pieces of paper and telephones told me they rarely paid much attention to the arguments in a communication but they took very seriously the position on an issue in a communication: are you for or opposed to X is what they want to know.
So you don't have to write much. If, for example, you think the war in Iraq is a bad idea or if you don't like the Bush administration's planned erosion of your civil rights (see "Ashcroft Freedom"), you don't have to say much more than that. Which means sending something potentially effective won't take much more time than engaging in an exercise that is almost certainly pointless.
Here are some email addresses you might find useful in such endeavors:
President George W. Bush president@whitehouse.gov
Vice President Richard Cheney vice.president@whitehouse.gov
Secretary of State Colin Powell Secretary@state.gov
U.S. Senate email addresses http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
U.S. House of Representatives home pages (all have an email link): http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.html
Governors' email addresses and web sites: http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/govemail.html
We've also heard that some of the foreign delegations with veto power on the Security Council might be interested in some expression of American opposition opinion to the Bush Administration war plans. They'll make their decisions on the basis of their politics at home, but the expression of concern from this side surely couldn't hurt. Just a sentence or two saying you and many people you know strongly oppose an unnecessary war and that you urge them to veto rather than abstain from the next Iraq war resolution::
China: chinun@undp.org
Russia: rf.mission@atnet.net
France: france-presse@un.int
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Copyright 2003 by Buffalo Report, Inc.