By Tim Kingston

IN THE WORLD of politics and political action, as in the world of personal relationships, there's one basic rule: If you don't say what you think, no one is going to hear you.

So, the next time you're propped on a bar stool snarling about the latest political atrocity perpetuated by the Bush administration, don't just sit there: go home and write a letter of opposition to your local congressional representative, pick up the phone and leave a message with his or her office, send an e-mail, or show up at one of the anti-war on Iraq demonstrations slated around the country for Dec. 10, International Human Rights Day.

It may not seem as if your voice is being counted, but we've talked to congressional staffers from around the country – in Republican and Democratic districts – and they all agree that when it comes to making decisions on going to war, community pressure has an impact.

Believe it or not, they say, the old writing-a-letter-to-your-elected-representative really does matter. For every armchair anarchist asserting, "It doesn't matter who you vote for; the government always gets in!," there are three congressional press officers and political aides who say loudly and clearly that direct constituent communications can change how a member votes.

"People are surprised by how much attention we do pay to ... old-fashioned American handwritten letters," one press attaché to a West Coast senator flatly noted. (Virtually all of the staffers we interviewed agreed to talk frankly on the condition their names would not be used.)

A note of caution: Sending yet another irate screed from San Francisco to Jesse Helms will have absolutely no impact. Congressional representatives and senators care almost exclusively about what the people who vote for them think.

So if you want to get through to a key representative elsewhere in the country, talk to your parents, siblings, former girlfriends and boyfriends who live in that district, and organize a letter-writing campaign that way.

It's not just the content that matters; it's also the volume. In every office, staffers say, there's some sort of threshold number of letters at which a representative will start paying attention. In some offices it might be the 5th handwritten letter, in others the 10th, but at a certain point, the message gets to the member: there's significant opposition to a war on Iraq.

In a state renowned for its racehorses, one conservative Republican member of Congress found himself inundated. "We had over 800 constituents saying they did not agree that we needed to go to war with Iraq," said a staffer to this congressmember, who told the story on the grounds that the district not be identified. "My boss decided to not to [vote to] go to war with Iraq."

Some staffers say e-mail and faxes can be better than letters, especially when time is an issue: thanks to the anthrax scare, congressional mail is carefully screened and often delayed. However, just as members of Congress tend to ignore phone messages that are obviously orchestrated, they tend to ignore e-mail messages that look like spam. To really get a member's attention, "face-to-face is always the best," said an aide to a member of Congress from a liberal central state. "Nothing beats a handshake and going face-to-face. Going and seeing members and stating the position of the voter and putting a face with the idea is always very important." That could mean making an appointment and going to Washington, D.C., or arranging to see the representative when he or she is back in the district.

Of course, it doesn't always work. Take, for example, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). "We reported that her office had a count, at one point, that they had received over 6,000 messages against a war and only 300 in favor," said Scott Lynch, communications director for Peace Action in Washington, D.C. "Yet she voted for the use of force resolution."

Lynch suggested that the only form of action that can possibly change the course of the coming war "is going to be local sustained demonstrations." It's not just the big protests in D.C.: there are protests in the city almost every day, and congressional staffers said that they aren't as effective as local, district-based actions aimed at individual members.

"I was talking recently to someone in Arkansas," Lynch said "who rattled off three little towns where there were antiwar protests, not Little Rock or the other big towns, but towns of 40,000 people right on the buckle of the Bible Belt."

Another crucial strategy, said an aide to one liberal Eastern seaboard congressmember, is to make sure "members get a sense that a segment of their district [opposes the war] that would not really be expected to take that position." For example, said the aide, if "a lot of veterans start writing in saying they don't like this, if people start getting letters from the American Legion or the VFW, that would be incredibly significant."

Lynch cites a professor whose husband works at the Virginia Military Institute, a major training ground for military officers. She became so concerned about the coming war on Iraq that she got half of the staff at the VMI to sign a letter expressing that concern, which she hand-delivered to Sen. John Warner (R-Va.).

"Peaceful protest is a very effective way to get the message out," stressed the aide to a liberal congressmember from a central state. "[It is] a message this country was built from the bottom up, not the top down."

If you're still feeling helpless, consider this: When the Vietnam War moratorium deposited hundreds of thousands of protesters in the capitol and Pentagon in 1969, many thought it had failed because the war was not immediately stopped. More than 30 years later, peace activist Daniel Ellsberg told a rapt audience at Zellerbach Auditorium in Berkeley that recently released classified documents revealed that the moratorium deterred then-president Nixon from attacking North Vietnam with nuclear weapons.
Tim Kingston is a communications associate at Global Exchange.