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dhrachth reblogged your photoset and added:
Townhalls don’t take place everywhere. They’re usually in major markets, during contentious election cycles. If you’re in a less populous area, there might not be enough votes to make it worth the politician’s while to go there. If you live in a staunchly red or blue state where your rep usually runs unopposed, you won’t see them either.
I think it’s an exaggeration to say calls and letters don’t matter. They do tally them up and the counts for and against something are taken into consideration. A personal appearance just has more impact. So if you can, you should.
Also, even if there aren’t townhalls in your area, there are probably local government meetings, things like City Council meetings, that are open to the public. And local politics do matter. I’ve been a city employee for 15 years and there are a lot of decisions that greatly affect the whole city that are basically decided by a couple dozen people who show up and voice their opinions.
I don’t know. I have yet to see a single mention anywhere in my life of any such kind of meeting. Clearly, they happen in NY; that’s where the dude in the linked-to video is from. I just don’t know how to find out where. Hopefully my local action group that now emails me six or seven times a fucking day will tell me if anything comes up, because I’m fucked if I can figure out where else to look. I live in New York State’s second-largest city, so it’s not like there isn’t population density; we’re a distant second, but we’re second.
I just keep seeing posts that are like “don’t write letters! don’t send emails! you’re wasting your time if you’re not doing this X thing!” and that’s super upsetting. I have anxiety and hearing-processing issues that mean that I often just plain don’t understand conversations conducted out loud, and memory problems that mean I often can’t remember what was agreed-upon by the end of the conversation, so me making a phone call is like a fucking horrorshow. (Just this moment I discovered that an Adulting phone call I made twelve days ago must have not gone well because a thing was supposed to have been transferred and hasn’t been, and I’m absolutely positive that I must not have understood something at the time, and I’m furious about it because I went over it like ten times because I knew I wasn’t going to get something right, and I begged them to let me do it in writing and they said it was impossible, and I’m fucking furious about it and already starting to make myself gag with anxiety about having to call them again.)
One of my best buds from high school is a journalist and a huge huge part of her job is that she goes to every meeting. School board meetings, town and city government meetings, etc. She has filed more Freedom Of Information Act requests than you can shake a stick at. And she has observed, before, how few people are often present at meetings where very, very important decisions are made. So I do know that.
But I don’t know when or where the meetings that would affect me are, and I don’t know how to find out. And this is why nobody’s at them.
Some of my testiness, though, is that I’ve made the apparently grave Tumblr boo-boo of following people I like, rather than just people who post content I’m interested in, so I see the same fucking thing over and over and over and over, and I’ve seen this goddamn post about four hundred times by now and it’s starting to feel like a personal condemnation of my inability to Take Effective Action.
dhrachth reblogged your photoset and added:
Townhalls don’t take place everywhere. They’re usually in major markets, during contentious election cycles. If you’re in a less populous area, there might not be enough votes to make it worth the politician’s while to go there. If you live in a staunchly red or blue state where your rep usually runs unopposed, you won’t see them either.
I think it’s an exaggeration to say calls and letters don’t matter. They do tally them up and the counts for and against something are taken into consideration. A personal appearance just has more impact. So if you can, you should.
Also, even if there aren’t townhalls in your area, there are probably local government meetings, things like City Council meetings, that are open to the public. And local politics do matter. I’ve been a city employee for 15 years and there are a lot of decisions that greatly affect the whole city that are basically decided by a couple dozen people who show up and voice their opinions.
I don’t know. I have yet to see a single mention anywhere in my life of any such kind of meeting. Clearly, they happen in NY; that’s where the dude in the linked-to video is from. I just don’t know how to find out where. Hopefully my local action group that now emails me six or seven times a fucking day will tell me if anything comes up, because I’m fucked if I can figure out where else to look. I live in New York State’s second-largest city, so it’s not like there isn’t population density; we’re a distant second, but we’re second.
I just keep seeing posts that are like “don’t write letters! don’t send emails! you’re wasting your time if you’re not doing this X thing!” and that’s super upsetting. I have anxiety and hearing-processing issues that mean that I often just plain don’t understand conversations conducted out loud, and memory problems that mean I often can’t remember what was agreed-upon by the end of the conversation, so me making a phone call is like a fucking horrorshow. (Just this moment I discovered that an Adulting phone call I made twelve days ago must have not gone well because a thing was supposed to have been transferred and hasn’t been, and I’m absolutely positive that I must not have understood something at the time, and I’m furious about it because I went over it like ten times because I knew I wasn’t going to get something right, and I begged them to let me do it in writing and they said it was impossible, and I’m fucking furious about it and already starting to make myself gag with anxiety about having to call them again.)
One of my best buds from high school is a journalist and a huge huge part of her job is that she goes to every meeting. School board meetings, town and city government meetings, etc. She has filed more Freedom Of Information Act requests than you can shake a stick at. And she has observed, before, how few people are often present at meetings where very, very important decisions are made. So I do know that.
But I don’t know when or where the meetings that would affect me are, and I don’t know how to find out. And this is why nobody’s at them.
Some of my testiness, though, is that I’ve made the apparently grave Tumblr boo-boo of following people I like, rather than just people who post content I’m interested in, so I see the same fucking thing over and over and over and over, and I’ve seen this goddamn post about four hundred times by now and it’s starting to feel like a personal condemnation of my inability to Take Effective Action.
