Since February, I have reached out to our elected officials on most days.
You may ask, does reaching out make a difference?
Individually, a single voice will not be heard and does not matter. If our voices join together, we create a loud chorus that is harder to ignore.
And the recent special elections show that even safe MAGA districts may not be that safe in the upcoming mid-terms. We need to remind the elected officials of that by singing together loudly.
Elected officials often live in isolated bubbles, listening primarily to their yes-men subordinates and to Trump. Recall that Republicans are now refusing to listen to voters in town hall meetings. Let our voices be heard!
The staffs of elected officials keep a tally of the voices they hear, including voices heard through calls, emails, faxes and letters. The staff record the topics, number of voices and their emotional intensity. (AI can help them to easily produce a daily report.) And when the elected officials’ ears are constantly filled with angry choruses, they have to wonder if it is now time to react.
Think of our daily, collective singing as being a mini No Kings Protest – every day!
What should the lyrics of your song say?
You can start with a call to action.
For example:
- For Congress, “You need to distance yourself from the increasingly unpopular Trump by calling hearings on ICE’s deportation of workers who are critical to our economy”, and then give some examples of those workers.
- For Trump, “To protect yourself politically, you must fire Hegseth” and then describe Hegseth’s liabilities. Or simply remind Trump that the Epstein scandal will never go away, and that Nixon’s legacy is Watergate.
You can choose song lyrics that make the elected officials worry that they might lose their mid-term elections.
You can sing with such intense emotion that the officials have to think, “Oh my gosh!”.
Polite, calm songs of friendly advice are less effective.
My Approach to Making My Voice Heard
I use resist.bot to send written communications to elected officials. If you prefer to call, consider using 5calls.org.
First: For inspiration for a message, I go to substack.com. You can download the substack app on your phone or access substack from your computer browser.
On substack, I read Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Hubbell and Robert Reich to get ideas for my message. Learn more about these three. I copy some of their words into a Word document as a starting point for my message.
Second: I go to resist.bot to deliver my message. Resist.bot is amazingly fast and easy to use. You don’t need to know the email addresses of your representatives, or even who your representatives are. That said, you cannot use resist.bot to send a message to someone that you don’t vote for, for example, Mike Johnson or cabinet members.
You can access resist.bot from either Facebook Messenger or a web browser. You can also use text messaging to access resist.bot but that experience is clunky and not recommended.
Your resist.bot interaction is simple:
- First you enter ‘WRITE’
- Then, from a dropdown menu, you choose who to send your message to: CONGRESS, STATE, SENATE or HOUSE. When I select CONGRESS, my message will go to Cruz, Cornyn and Roy. To send a message to Trump, type “President” rather than use a dropdown option.
- At the next prompt, you then either type in your message or insert your message using copy/paste
- Then, from a dropdown menu, you can select SEND to send your message ,or can choose to re-write your message or change the recipients.
- Then, from a dropdown menu, you select a delivery choice: USPS, fax or email. Email is free to use. The other options are not free. Email messages to your elected officials will share your name and your email address.
That’s it! So simple! Your message goes to your selected recipients. Every day, resist.bot send tens of thousands of messages to elected officials.