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jrtomThe activist organizations that I get email from occasionally encourage people to write letters to the editor on issues of the day.
The thing is that I suspect that most people write letters to the editor of the paper that they enjoy reading the most. Which, aside from those people that enjoy being pissed off, tends to be the paper whose bias is most congruent with their own (where there's more than one local paper, anyway). Which means that the people they're talking to are, generally speaking, more likely than not to agree with them.
These are not the people you need to be convincing. If you think that writing letters to the editor is useful at swaying the opinions of readers of that paper, pick the paper whose editorial slant you don't like. Your reception won't be as friendly, but you'll let the readers know that another perspective exists, at least, and might incidentally give heart to the folks in that community that do agree with you, and have been feeling outnumbered.
(I wonder what it feels like to be a dogmatic fundamentalist Republican in San Francisco right now?)
This might have a couple of nice side effects: if you want to do a good job of persuading, then you'll have to consider the perspective of your audience. Which means that you'll be less likely to demonize them in your own mind. While I have enjoyed reading the occasional polemic on the recent election results, getting a bunch of people to reinforce each others' rage with increasingly inflammatory statements is, IMO, ultimately corrosive.
(One of the more annoying versions of this was the repeated "say that X won the debate!" meme; I know that some people believe that one should fight spin with spin, but it just makes me not-very-metaphorically sick to my stomach, in much the same way that people basing their primary vote on "electability" does.)
The thing is that I suspect that most people write letters to the editor of the paper that they enjoy reading the most. Which, aside from those people that enjoy being pissed off, tends to be the paper whose bias is most congruent with their own (where there's more than one local paper, anyway). Which means that the people they're talking to are, generally speaking, more likely than not to agree with them.
These are not the people you need to be convincing. If you think that writing letters to the editor is useful at swaying the opinions of readers of that paper, pick the paper whose editorial slant you don't like. Your reception won't be as friendly, but you'll let the readers know that another perspective exists, at least, and might incidentally give heart to the folks in that community that do agree with you, and have been feeling outnumbered.
(I wonder what it feels like to be a dogmatic fundamentalist Republican in San Francisco right now?)
This might have a couple of nice side effects: if you want to do a good job of persuading, then you'll have to consider the perspective of your audience. Which means that you'll be less likely to demonize them in your own mind. While I have enjoyed reading the occasional polemic on the recent election results, getting a bunch of people to reinforce each others' rage with increasingly inflammatory statements is, IMO, ultimately corrosive.
