Dear Tom,

This is the week I’ve been waiting for. I received three letters from you and got to attend a town hall meeting in my neighborhood. It was a good week for contact with my representative.

In an ideal world, these contacts would have gone something like this:

The letters I received from your office would have said, “Wow, Susan! You’ve written to me almost weekly since November. I appreciate how you’re trying to frame issues in terms of common ground that we share. I’m reading and paying attention to what you’re saying.”

The town hall meeting I attended would have featured a lot of calm constituents taking turns asking questions and hearing your answers. There would have been time and space for each person to ask the questions or make the statements they wanted to, and you would have been able to explain what political initiatives you were working on and why.

We don’t live in an ideal world.

So what actually happened this week

I received three form letters from you—stock responses on popular topics. These are responses your office can send out to whoever writes a letter or makes a phone call. If a constituent writes with concerns about health care, she gets the stock health-care letter. If a constituent calls about immigration, he gets the stock immigration letter. I get it. You’ve got hundreds of thousands of constituents. I don’t know how many letters or phone calls you receive every day. Hundreds? Samara, Kyle, Natalie, Tom, and Brenden (and others in your office) don’t have time to craft individualized responses.

I had the fantasy that maybe because I put considerable time into this correspondence and more than a hundred people are reading what I write to you that I was a special case. Maybe I would get a more personalized reply. Nope.

The town hall meeting was also not ideal. I arrived to find hundreds of people standing in a muddy parking lot—some carrying signs protesting various policies you support. You had done three other town hall meetings that day and arrived late. There wasn’t room for everyone inside the building you’d reserved so you had to answer questions via a borrowed megaphone. Some people at the event were loud and rowdy, interrupting you and making it hard both for people to ask questions and for you to give responses.

I stayed around for half an hour after you arrived before I had to go meet my family for supper. I knew quite a few people at the meeting who had come prepared with carefully and gently worded questions. They didn’t have a chance to speak while I was there, and it wasn’t looking likely to happen later. It was pretty chaotic and disappointing.

So this week did not exactly satisfy my desire for productive and meaningful political engagement.  But it wasn’t a complete train wreck either.

First, you did write me back! That’s something. I’m happy to see that your office is catching up with the standard back-and-forth that representatives have with their constituents. I was getting worried, since I had been writing to you for several months and hadn’t even received one of these form letters. So now you’ve done that.

Second, I was impressed with your calm and measured engagement with some pretty angry people at the town hall meeting. Some of your congressional colleagues are refusing to hold town hall meetings or are holding them by phone so that they can control the situation. You put yourself in the middle of a muddy parking lot with people who were shouting at you and you kept your cool.

That was courageous. I may not agree with all of your policy ideas, but I was impressed with you yesterday. I hope you keep doing these town hall meetings (maybe pick some larger venues and get microphones) and modeling willingness to engage with people who disagree with you. Well done, Tom.

Also, I left early and didn’t get to see how the event played out. When I checked Facebook later in the evening, I saw a group photo with you and a bunch of the people I knew at the event. It looks like they did get to interact with you in a more peaceful way. I gave up too soon and regret I didn’t stick around a little longer.

So on the whole, I’m hopeful. Your office is getting back into its routine. And when constituents were more patient and persistent than I was, they got to engage with you.

I’m not giving up. I’ll keep writing and keep showing up to try to meet you whenever I can—even if it’s the middle of a muddy parking lot in a messy, imperfect world.

With hope,


2 thoughts on “Contact!

  1. Actually, I think that you did leave too soon. There were wonderful, well researched questions and he did get a chance to “answer” most of them without a huge ruckus. People shushed each other and sometimes the crowd went totally silent as questions were asked. I thought that for the most part it was very respectful on both sides. I too, give him a lot of credit for standing in the crowd and taking more than an hour’s worth of questions from upset and frustrated constituents. I realized as we drove home, that there was no sign of a police presence anywhere, nor was any needed.


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