Useless Tid-bits
In a former life I led California homeschoolers in the march for freedom. A group of us diligently fought restrictive legislation that affected Homeschooling or homeschoolers in general.
As you can imagine, we gained quite an education on how our system of government works. I know lots of tid-bits of seemingly useless information but useless is an interesting word because surely everything has worth to someone or else it wouldn’t exist, right?
For instance…did you know that…
- Each legislator has staff members who are paid out of taxpayer dollars to clip all newspaper clippings, magazine articles, articles both online and in print. Can’t they do their own scrap booking on their own time, just like the rest of us?
- How you communicate with your legislator matters a great deal, to him or her. Your letters, faxes and E-mails are assigned a certain weight. Such as one letter represents a 1,000 other individuals, one-fax represents 100 people and an E-mail represents 10 others.
While sending a letter might be good for the economy, sending a fax wastes almost as much paper. However, if you send an E-mail to your legislator, you should fully expect it to go un-read and unanswered, except of course by those annoying auto responders. Don’t you just hate to get those? That really has a way of making one feel important and respected!
If you ask me it demonstrates their lack of respect for those of us who voted them into office.
When the amount of E-mail gets overwhelming, they get dumped. Erased. Unread. If these legislators can pay someone to clip newspaper clippings by gosh they can pay someone to print off the letters, read them and compile a summary of those documents.
Where do these arrogant people get off accepting pay for work they haven’t done. It is our duty as tax paying citizens to participate in our government. Our legislators need to start doing their jobs or they won’t have them for long.
I highly recommend getting to know your local politicians and policymakers. Make sure when they are passing legislation that affects your family that he or she can’t quite get you out of their mind. They need to know that we are counting on them to do the right thing, not the easy thing and certainly not a decision that is good for their political career but bad for everyone else.
Who knows you might discover your own useless tid-bits of information.
Be a part of the solution, get involved today. I’ll be adding more details here soon.