Meditating on the Writing of Postcards

Like many other people in the United States, I’ve been writing postcards to voters in other states as a way of doing something about the election. I’ll vote, of course, and I’m sending a little money here and there as well.

Given the number of postcards I can reasonably write and the amount of money I can afford to send, not to mention the value of my single vote, all those things only matter if a lot of other people do them as well.

But the stress of “the most important election of our lives” is weighing on me. I don’t call people, because I despise getting such calls and cannot bear to do that to others. Postcards I can do without having to talk to a stranger who doesn’t really want to talk with me.

In general, while I worry a lot and always vote – the last time I skipped an election was a runoff between a dishonest Democrat who was going to win anyway and a well-intentioned good-government Republican whose ideas on how to run a city were disastrous – I am not excited about electoral politics. I prefer to put my energy for change into building something that might grow into better systems. Co-ops, for example.

I came to that after being active in the antiwar movement back in the day when I realized that I preferred making things to protesting them. Not that I haven’t done a lot of protesting as well – it’s kind of like voting: you gotta do it from time to time.

Anyway, I’m trying to do my small part to fend off fascism – and yes, there is a right and wrong side in this election and not just in the presidential race. I don’t think the United States survives as a nation if we don’t stop this latest effort to create an authoritarian state.

And though I can think of reasonable arguments for the dismantling of the United States, it would be hell to live through that period and while I’m old, I’m not so old that I won’t have to.

Also, I’m pretty much in favor of getting a sane base in place and trying to fix the country’s problems from there. See above, where I mentioned I preferred building things to protests.

I mean, we already had a civil war over how the country should be governed. As someone who has read a bit of history, I contend that we wouldn’t be in this mess if we hadn’t abandoned Reconstruction after that nasty war. The Civil War Amendments to the Constitution gave us a way to build the country we ought to be, but we haven’t used them as well as we should.

So I’m doing my tiny bit of writing postcards, and since those postcards are going to young voters, I’m doing my best to print my message rather than writing longhand. I have heard that schools are no longer teaching that (they say cursive, but I’ve always liked the word longhand better) and that apparently a lot of younger people don’t read it well.

It’s probably a good thing, because my printing is marginally more readable than my longhand. I am from a time where they emphasized handwriting in school and it was mostly torture for me, because I was never very good at it. Fine motor coordination is not one of my talents and I still remember not being allowed to use the lovely fountain pen my father bought me because my writing was too messy.

Mind you, I was very good early on at understanding words and reasonably good at spelling (and could use a dictionary) and got the hang of sentences and paragraphs very quickly. It was the technical skill of putting the letters on the page that gave me trouble.

That said, I’m glad I learned to write longhand, because I write much faster that way, if not as legibly. Printing is slow and hard. Truth is, I much prefer typing (or perhaps they call it keyboarding these days). I think best with my hands on a keyboard and yes, I touch type.

But you can’t type postcards easily, especially not if you no longer have an actual typewriter, and anyway the purpose of writing them by hand is to show the voters that you put something into it and that it’s not mass produced.

I mean, it’s sort of mass-produced – I have a list of people and words I’m supposed to say – but I am doing them one at a time. A human being handles them, at least.

Despite my own travails at learning handwriting, I’m in favor of kids learning both printing and longhand, as well as typing. Actually, dictation is probably a good skill to develop as well – I remember learning to do a little of that in one of the few jobs where I actually had a secretary to do my typing and these days lots of people speak to their phones to send texts and such.

I’m not in favor of grading kids on it, just exposing them to enough so that they can figure out what works best for them. Each of these skills is a little different. I keep seeing older people who hate cursive, just as an example, and while I’m not among them, I see no reason why they should have been forced to use it when they wrote papers for school.

I am told that taking notes by hand, however you make your letters, is useful. Certainly I find doodling and making notes by hand useful when I’m listening to a talk. Though as a reporter who used to cover meetings, I vastly preferred a laptop because the keyboard was way faster and I could cut and paste from my notes when doing my final story.

I don’t think there’s one right way to communicate with other people. That holds true for how to help get the vote out for an election. One-on-one talking to people may be the most effective, but it probably works better with people who aren’t going to jump down the other person’s throat if they express a preference for the fascists.

Which is to say, people who aren’t me. I grew up being careful when talking politics and religion, but I can’t do it anymore.

So I’ll go write a few more postcards and hope the recipients can read them. And that they’ll register and vote, preferably for the right people.