I was a one-way pen pal for democracy in 2018, writing letters and postcards to the uninitiated during that year’s midterm elections.
I had spent the previous months marching for women, science, immigrants and Muslims. Then I decided walking wasn’t enough. I need to engage with individual Americans in electing politicians who share my values.
So in September, I attended a grassroots event to learn about volunteer voter outreach hosted by a Los Angeles group called Civic Sundays. We can choose to learn how to knock on doors, call and text potential voters or write postcards to get people involved.
I’ve never heard of writing postcards to strangers as a way to encourage them to vote. But I am fascinated by the thought of an analogous way to save democracy. Civic Week and other organizations, many alive after the 2016 presidential election, provided volunteers with lists of names and addresses of registered voters. Writers supply their own writing, stamps and sometimes postcards.
I joined a large table of people with seemingly professional-level glitter and Magic Marker skills. When the postcard looked like an illuminated manuscript, I struggled to make it readable. A fourth-grade teacher once told me that my handwriting resembled a hostage ransom note, but luckily, I didn’t have to take a handwriting test to get a seat at the postcard table (some organizations actually require one).
I found the work rather healthy, but I wasn’t sold on the idea of ​​trying to engage a population that couldn’t be bothered to vote.
The more postcards I write, the more I start to wonder: Who is this rare voter? Why don’t they do their civic duty? If I look up their address on Google Maps, what will I see? Uncut grass? Gated mansions?
I became racked by the desire to know that these shirkers of civil responsibility. But we have been given clear instructions: Don’t engage with the people who receive your message. However, we follow a clear and concise script with just a few sentences.
I’m participating in another postcard writing campaign for the 2020 presidential election. This time, I’m specifically asking for names from the swing state, Michigan. When I wrote to this stranger, I became increasingly frustrated, imagining them enjoying the weekend without a scintilla of guilt vote while I agonized whether they could be offended by the stamp with the cat.
When I mentioned these frustrations to a cynical friend, he told me to read Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s famous 1966 book “Letters to Young Activists.” I should have been suspicious, because my friend was the last person to write a postcard to a stranger. Of course, Merton’s words did not allow the fate of my postcards. “(D) is independent of expected outcomes,” he wrote. “When you do the kind of work that you have done, which is actually the work of the apostles, you may have to face the fact that your work will seem futile and may not even yield any results, otherwise it may have a different result than that’s what you want.”
After reading Merton’s letter, I waited a few months not write the scofflaw voters of Michigan, Georgia, Arizona or wherever.
But as the 2024 election campaign begins, with the country’s future once again on the ballot, I’m asking for another postcard list.
This time one of the options was to write for people in my own state, California. This is more like writing a neighbor than a distant and unknown person. After I had my list and started reading names and addresses, I realized that some of the postcards will go to people who live near the city where I work.
Then it happened. I know the name. The Gen Zer who needs encouragement to vote is one of those smart, smart students.
I finally have an answer about the person I wrote about. They are like the rest of us: unmarried singles and matriarchs of large families, people who drive electric cars and people who drive big trucks, charming and irritating people and neighbors who play music that is too loud but they are sweet with children. People who are busy with life, sometimes forget or don’t choose.
Recognizing just one name convinced me that I had to write these letters of democracy, to remind others, even if they don’t listen or don’t want to listen, that their voices matter. With this new insight into Merton’s famous missive, I must believe, as he says, “the value, the truth, the truth of the work.”
Melissa Wall is a professor of journalism at Cal State Northridge who studies citizen participation in the news. This article was produced in partnership with Zócalo Public Square.
