Vote Forward letters

[sonia]

I joined Vote Forward and just wrote 5 letters! I heard about it via swan_tower, who said it's proven to make a difference, reaches out to youth and/or minority voters, and has a small initial commitment.

Here's what I added to each letter: I'm voting this year because "I care! I want all of us to have our basic needs met and feel safe and valued. I hope you will vote too!"

I mean it SO HARD. Maybe each recipient will feel how much I want them individually to feel safe and valued, and exercise their right to vote in that direction.

Things I'm not writing, but I also mean: I am so goddamn scared. PLEASE vote. PLEASE. Please let my small effort flow with the larger stream of everyone's efforts and turn the tide.

Maybe I'll do 5 letters each day until they get mailed out on October 17th. I'm using the pretty "American Gardens" stamps that I bought to support the post office earlier this year. (Will need to acquire more business size envelopes and stamps if I'm really going to do it every day!)

Comments

[minoanmiss]

This is SO AWESOME of you!

[sonia]

Thank you! It's my tiny yawp...

[runpunkrun]

That is a lovely message! I struggled with mine, and it came out kind of dry, probably, but I still meant it. Maybe I'll borrow your wording and write a few more letters for them.

[sonia]

Thank you! :-) Feel free to use it! I struggled with it too. I thought it was strange that there wasn't a direct request to vote in the letter. I also worried that "safe" has been co-opted by the right, but I want to take it back. And some of these are gonna have flag stamps on them because that's what's available at Office Depot, and we're just gonna have to take that back too. These days I flinch when I see my own country's flag, which is ... not a good sign about how things are going.

[runpunkrun]

Yay, I'll write some more letters today! All I have left is frog and Earth Day stamps, which feel incredibly left-wing to me because of the bananas political environment we're living in where saying you want access to clean water is a radical act.

My first batch of letters have flag stamps on them, which do make me flinch a little, but it's our flag and voting is patriotic and I'm taking that back, too.

[sonia]

*waves an Earth Day flag encouragingly* in your direction. These little sparks of activism from one person to the next feel good to me.

where saying you want access to clean water is a radical act.
... yeah. Seems like if a lot of people would step back and say, "Do I believe that [access to clean water is radical]? Wait, no, I don't at all!" it would solve a lot of our problems immediately.

[runpunkrun]

These little sparks of activism from one person to the next feel good to me.

Me too. We're all working on this together. <3

[tshuma]

Hooray! My group has been doing these too, and it was so satisfying to send out a fleet of letters we'd all saved.

[sonia]

Yay!! Thanks to you and your group!