Has E-mail lost its sting?

I got a list of Senator's names, addresses, and represented states last night with every intention of using them to voice my opinion to every Senator in our country and I'm still going to do that however there is a problem with it. This problem doesn't stem from me, nor does it stem from the source of the list. This problem stems from the media. We as a nation know who Daniel Akaka (D-HI) is, we know who Olympia Snowe (R-ME) is, or John Barrasso (R-WY) is and why is that?


The media has made us all aware of who each of these people are, how they vote, what they vote for, what pork projects are included in the bills they vote for and on and on ad nauseam. While all of this information is real good to have do we really have a right to voice an opinion to them about how they vote. I am a strong states rights advocate and in being so I have to wonder what right I have to insert my views into Daniel or Olympia or John's email boxes. Shouldn't the voters in their states be doing that? Shouldn't the Senators and Congress people from our state only be listening to our state's voters.

This is why I support a state law requiring that only citizens and businesses from within the state be able to contribute to the campaign of our elected officials. This would eliminate PAC and lobby money and would make our representatives responsive to us.

Back to email sting. I work in the computer industry and manage a network of about 300 servers, each of those servers are monitored for about 10 different things. These things range from a basic 'ping' (just a signal asking the server if it is still alive) to a list of which files the backup software was unable to get.

We go into how much disk space is remaining on the system to how much memory it used at its peak. All of these monitoring tools have to report to someone or in my case 6 someones (including me) so we try and split the emails up so not everyone in the group is getting every email generated by every problem or status check that occurs. With that said, even I, as the manager of the group, get about 2 to 3 thousand of these emails a week. I have to fight every day to make sure I pay attention to them all and it still doesn't happen.

 Now, multiply that by 300 million people in this country. Even if only 50 million have the capacity to generate emails and of that 50 million only 1 million are politically active and use email, what would that number be in an elected representatives mail box?

Let's just say for arguments sake that we could only send emails to our elected officials, and again for arguments sake all states had an equal number of emailers, that would be 20,000 emails per state (that of course depends on whether or not you use 50 states or the 57 the president uses). Now for arguments sake let's just say 1% of active people around the country send an email to my representatives…1% of 1,000,000 is 10,000 so now with the active people in state, 20,000 and the 1%ers, another 10,000, would mean they get 30,000 emails a week. I only get 2 to 3 thousand a week and I can't stay on top of them so the sting is gone.

I know our representatives have staff to deal with the emails but the sting is gone, they don't even read them. Their staff reads them with the intent to tally a number for and a number against a particular issue. We waste all of our time having these passions about an issue, writing those feelings out in a long winded email to have it summarized down to "Healthcare-no" or "Fund troops in Afghanistan-yes" and in the end its "Healthcare 15,000 for and 15,000 against" and Harry says "well my vote counts and I'm for it so I vote yes" and it now becomes 30,000 for health care from Nevada.

prp