Many of “thousand of Reddit stories” are just like your comment. Repeating a meme, nothing more.
Will your representatives always be responsive? No. Some are worse than others. On some issues, the political tea leaves are too obvious to merit discussion.
By and large, however, representatives and their staff care about their constituents. When you call (better than form responses on websites), you show you care about an issue. Their offices want to know if you represent a budding movement they can attach to.
You’ve cast aside a core civic right and, in my opinion, duty, based on anonymous forum comments. It would take you thirty minutes to call yourself, but that’s too much of a hassle. Fine, that’s your right. It’s also mine to call out your comments as emotional self-indulgence more than anything substantive.
No memes here, just detailed accounts which overwhelmingly demonstrate that paid-for representatives have a strategy to deal with this.
As for civic duties, you do not have a civic duty to uphold a process which is a textbook example of regulatory capture. If you get success by doing it, great. But statistically, for the majority of Americans, talking to their rep is worse than doing nothing. It's spending their time and effort on a process which is designed to ignore them, so they don't spend that same effort searching for an alternative process which might actually work.
This process used to be effective; before it was circumvented by lobbying activity. You can't cling to it today just because it worked yesterday. You also can't get jobs by just turning up to places and handing out your CV. Times change.
You need to actually read your cites. Many of your link actually support what we've been saying. Their concerns were passed along to the representatives and they were pleased with the responses they got.
Many of “thousand of Reddit stories” are just like your comment. Repeating a meme, nothing more.
Will your representatives always be responsive? No. Some are worse than others. On some issues, the political tea leaves are too obvious to merit discussion.
By and large, however, representatives and their staff care about their constituents. When you call (better than form responses on websites), you show you care about an issue. Their offices want to know if you represent a budding movement they can attach to.
You’ve cast aside a core civic right and, in my opinion, duty, based on anonymous forum comments. It would take you thirty minutes to call yourself, but that’s too much of a hassle. Fine, that’s your right. It’s also mine to call out your comments as emotional self-indulgence more than anything substantive.