Congress

Online forums are fine for venting, but venting does not replace action. As someone said, desperate times call for desperate measures, so here’s an idea for actually doing something. It’ll take a lot of work by some very dedicated and committed people, but I think it would get the message across to where it needs to go.

I’m calling it “Operation Pledge:”

1. Draft a simple, one-page document to the effect of “I pledge that I will not vote for my current members of Congress at the next election due to their continued lack of representation of us, the Americans who voted for them.” Something like that.

2. Put the pledge document online where people can download it and sign it. No need to mail it to members of Congress.

3. After several thousand of these have been downloaded, take out a full-page ad in a national newspaper, outlining the pledge and listing the names of everyone who took it. Ideally, there would be so many names that they would need to printed in a very small font.

4. Wait a couple of days for the news outlets to pick up on it.

5. Then, simultaneously, similar full-page ads appear in dozens of newspapers across the U.S., of course with different names.

The idea behind this, of course, is that members of Congress (all politicians, really) want to get re-elected. We can call them, write them, demonstrate, and so forth, but it doesn’t do any good if it doesn’t hit them where it hurts. This would hit them where it hurts.