A Civic Action Tip for the Anxious and Easily Overwhelmed

the prayer to call

A quick note: I haven’t posted very much comedy on this comedy newsletter lately, but you all seem to like the more serious stuff as well. I’m grateful for that, since I haven’t been in a particularly comedic mood. That being said! I have a few posts in production, as well as a new project announcement, so watch this space. 

Hi friends, 

My lovely friend, a retired clergy member, joked to me recently that she used to do the call to prayer, and now she does “the prayer to call” - one’s representatives, that is. That phrase has really stuck with me. I haven’t been to church regularly in years*, but the last few months I have been doing my best to show up every day for the prayer to call. 

I feel like he would approve?

I think many of us would like to be doing more to fight this regime, but we get stuck in the bad feelings and overwhelm before taking action. Today I want to talk about a few ways to lower the barriers to entry in order to start doing one of the easiest ways to push back - calling our congressional representatives.

To be clear, calling our representatives is just one of many different ways to engage with this moment. I don’t want to act like it’s the most important kind of activism, or the only kind happening, or the most effective, etc. However, calling our representatives is a type of action that is both accessible to many, and disproportionately effective compared to how much effort it is. It’s quite difficult to chain oneself to a pipeline, for example. It can even be difficult to go to an in-person protest, depending on your personal situation. Picking up the phone, though, is something almost everyone can do, and congressional staffers do listen and take notes, even when their boss has opposite political views to the caller.** 

So, without further ado, here are a few ways I went from someone who never called my representatives to someone who calls them every (week)day:

1. Subscribing to the newsletter Chop Wood, Carry Water
   In this newsletter, activist Jessica Craven does all the heavy lifting for us. She researches which bills and issues need the most immediate attention and writes short, accessible posts every weekday that include a quick pep talk, a call script, and a couple of bonus actions. On Sundays she also sends out a newsletter recapping all of the good news that happened the previous week, which I have found to be a much-needed morale boost. 

2. Downloading 5 Calls on my phone
   I had heard about this app before this year but for some reason I thought it would be more complicated than it is so I waited for ages to actually get it. You guys, it is SO EASY. You literally just plug in your zip code and it gives you your Congressional representatives’ D.C. numbers, and then you can scroll through a menu of possible issues to call about, each with a suggested script. I like that it tells you how many other people have also made calls on the same topic - it helps me feel less alone in this whole thing. 

   
   EXTRA PRO TIP: For anyone with phone anxiety, you can call after hours and leave a voicemail! Just make sure to say your zip code and specifically identify yourself as a constituent so that your call is counted. I frequently call after hours because I need to wait for my child to go to bed. And I know that my messages are being received because I’ve been getting email responses from all three of my representatives. Annoyingly for my fellow Pennsylvanians, Fetterman has stopped accepting voicemails after hours, so I have actually started doing my calls earlier in the day for the last few weeks. My call usually goes to voicemail anyway, and on the rare occasion it doesn’t, I have a perfectly chill conversation with a congressional staffer. 

   
   Altogether, with these tools I spend probably 5-10 minutes a day making these calls. There’s plenty more I could say, but I want to keep this quick and digestible. Please feel free to leave any tips in the comments! 

   *I’ve turned into a “Chreaster” - a Christmas and Easter Christian.

   **AOC recently made a video discussing how she gets significantly more calls from conservative constituents than from liberals, and while those calls don’t change her stance on progressive issues, getting that volume of calls does shift the whole legislative conversation and political context to the right. That’s bad news for us, but it’s also good news in the sense that we have the opportunity to help shift the conversation to the left just by picking up the phone.