I pledge Allegiance

Someone sent me yet another chain letter. I get these all the time for all sorts of causes. Basically, there is a list of hundreds of names asking someone to do something with the request if you are the 3,000th person or whatever random number someone picked, then you e-mail it to the address of the President or some Senator or Representative or ACLU bigwig or whatever group they are targeting. And somehow you are supposed to believe these letters that are forwarded to apparently hundreds of people at a time, these e-mail letters are going to convince the President to reinstate the Pledge of Allegiance into schools or the Senator to save the Wildlife Refuge or the ACLU to stop being the ACLU or whatever the target is.
I would assume we all know these things are about as effective as a one legged man in a tail kicking contest. Seriously, in the highly unlikely event that President@WhiteHouse.gov is actually a legit e-mail address and assuming it is NOT the one given out for junk e-mail such as lists of thousands of anonymous people with less vetting of their signatures than the fraud laden ballot measures trying to get the President to reinstate the Pledge, the odds this would ever be seen by the President rather than someone hired to oversee a spurious e-mail adress are about the same as me flying to Iceland and winning the goat groping contest. (Don't ask. Some of us know about it. It is real. It is annual. It is scary. Just one more reason the US need not make Iceland the 54th state)
No, these are a good idea. Grass roots involvement, letting your Senator or pressure group know what is important to you and that you agree or disagree with their actions. It is just poor execution. People misunderstand and misuse the power of the Internet.
I could be wrong. I just think the plan someone forwarded me to swamp the ACLU with Christmas Cards in an attempt to get them to stop their stupid and repeated attempts to remove Christmas trees and Nativity scenes out of the public eye. I will admit those highly annoy and irritate me...I just don't think a few thousand people sending them Christmas cards is going to wake anyone at the ACLU up and make them say, "Hey...the Founding Fathers WERE religious...why, they even prayed at the Constitutional Convention and that prayer has been credited by such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin with saving the colonies from reverting to British control...oh, and they did establish a chaplain to open each session of Congress with a prayer...apparently when they said no law establishing a religion they meant no law establishing any particular church, the concept of separation of church and state actually goes to letters between Thomas Jefferson and the Baptist (or was it Presbyterian) church and he was saying it was a bad idea...I am going to stop this attack on the foundation of our country and do something useful"? No, I don;t think it will. It is more likely to annoy them and be a waste of the stamp and card. And in its own way, just as wrong as the ACLU's anti religion attacks.
But hey, where cards won't work, maybe thousands of random signatures will get the job done...whatever.
Maybe if instead of spending their time devising useless online e-mail petitions that remind me of the African prince needing my bank account numbers so he can give me millions of dollars trying to get people to stop oil drilling in dog's teeth or putting the Pledge into schools or keeping a sports team in New Orleans, people should set out to live the example they should which will then lead to them getting what they want much more effectively. Of course, I could be wrong...maybe I should sign the petition to bring Goat Groping to Oregon...