fun fact about me: When I was 6 years old I sent so much hate mail to the president (the second Bush) that the mail carrier had to tell my mom I needed to stop before we got FBI’d
I was COMPLETELY unaware of the US political scene or why the adults in my life hated Bush, but I knew I hated him because he let people shoot wolves from helicopters and that’s mean and shitty
I also had a poor grasp on how stamps worked, so given that I wasn’t allowed to continually throw money away by putting stamps on my presidential hate mail, a lot of the times I just drew squares with little pictures inside on the corner.
Love, love, love reading more proof that everyone should encourage the children in their lives to write to elected officials–it teaches them about citizenship and can also be very funny.
When I taught second grade, one of the options for students who had finished their work was to write a letter to the president. I would send all of the letters in a big envelope at the end of every month.
Watching my students get more and more frustrated with him (and concerned about his wellbeing) was not the result I’d hoped for when I came up with the idea, but it was kind of hilarious.
See, Obama had a standard packet with information and activities about his dog he’d send in response to letters from very young citizens…and of course his office sent one back to our class every single time we sent mail.
So eventually all of the letters looked something like this:
Dear President Obama,
I am writing about the environment. I am sad that the Great Barrier Reef is hurt. Also the Amazon Rainforest. Can you help? PLEASE DON’T WRITE BACK TO TELL ME ABOUT YOUR DOG AGAIN. WE ALREADY KNOW ALL ABOUT BO. WE COMPLETED THE MAZE AND COLORED HIM IN. It is good that you love your pet a lot. But try to remember the environment. It is also important.
Loving this post, not least because it reminded me of this email and attachment that my kid’s 5th grade teacher sent us last November.
Context: we are Canadian, our provincial government is currently conservative and the CUPE strike was for teachers and support staff at an adjacent school board that didn’t affect my kid’s school but was talked about with them in the current events/being active in your community sense.
This is the email I opened:
and this was the attachment:
I haven’t thought about this for months, so thank you for inadvertently reminding me it existed so I could lose my shit laughing about it all over again!
so just because i ahve a rare and incurable condition where i can only understand human suffering thru the lens of showtunes and cartoons aimed at preteens means my posts about labor disputes aren’t insightful? tch [turns on my heel and like five pins fall off my little backpack with nothing inside except the leather journal i’m writing my fantasy novel in] [turns back around immediately] so yeah it’s sort of a chaotic found family story and it’s like really wholesome but feral AF and there’s a lot of queer representation
