Dear Congressman/Senator/Governor/other Elected official,

First off, I would like to point out to you right on the onset I consider you mine. You are my representative, my voice, my conscience, my will when it comes to the law, rules, and regulations of this country. You speak for me. You bear my vote and my witness. Clearly we must establish this up front because, as so often appears the case, you rarely invoke “me.” You tell me about what YOU will do quite often but what will you do in my name? How will you use my name? Remember that you speak for me and as such, I have a thing or two to tell you.

Thomas Paine said “government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” You are fast becoming an intolerable evil. Let us begin with the volume of waste that has arrived at my doorstep in the past few weeks. I could paper and entire living room in the sheer junk that has arrived for you or any number of your opponents. Yes, I understand that in many cases, you had nothing to do with it. Yet, you did. You created the environment that allowed this kind of waste and ridiculous spending to occur. Millions upon millions of dollars were spent in this country to elect you – to sway my vote one way or another with splashy campaign ads and mailers.

I didn’t read one.

Would that your money, or the money of those who would elect you could have gone to do something better for the world. That would have swayed my vote. Would that you had spent it philanthropical groups, on public works, on libraries or schools, on roads and homelessness. That would have surely bought my vote. Would that you had spent it by giving jobs to people, rather than to volunteers who mail these things or place them on doorsteps. I would have cast a YES vote for you in a heartbeat.

Stop calling me at all hours of the day to ask me to vote for you. I hang up, as do thousands, if not millions, of others. Stop sending people in your name to court me, to buy me, to seduce me. I am not so easily led. Instead, call me personally. Talk with me, not at me. Find out what my life is like and what I have to say. Find out what is important to me as a person, as a wife, as a homeowner, as an employee, as a business owner. Find out what it’s like to live where I live and deal with what I do, day in, day out. Learn me and you learn how to speak for me.

“Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country – and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians. ” Charles Krauthammer

Don’t be surprised at my disillusionment with politics and government. I am a libertarian, pure and simple. I believe there does need to be a government but minimal, and with my voice in the lead. We are a republic, which Webster’s says is “b (1) : a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law (2) : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government.”

Do you want my vote next time? Do you want what I have to say? Then work for it. Don’t WORK in Washington – work for me. Ask me what I want, listen to what I have to say, then do what I ask you to do. THAT is why I vote for you. Work for me, and I will provide you that one little check mark you want, the one that might put you over the top. Find some values – ones that are real. Find some ethics – ones that I would live by. Find some heart – remember what it’s like to be a person in this world, in this country. Take a moment and breathe the air I breathe, walk in my shoes.

You might actually find that soul that you lost so long ago.

I am a realist enough to know that tonight, election night, I will lose once again. We all will. And the Democratic Republic of the United States of America gasps, another death rattle in all our chests. Tonight, we again lose our choice under the guise of democracy. Again, we lose our right to be a nation of individual thinkers, bound to the lowest common denominator: the politician.

Gods help us all.

-TDD