Proclamations—a public statement on a weighty issue—are central to the Committees of Correspondence mission. Proclamations carry no legal weight, but help inform and educate the public on a wide-variety of issues. Since the general public is often not getting reliable information elsewhere in the public arena, the Committees can help rectify that.
The original Committees of Correspondence would each meet regularly and appoint a subcommittee to draft the proclamation. At a future meeting, the Committee would adopt it, send it back for editing, or table it. Once adopted, the Committee would publish proclamations in newspaper broadsides or pamphlets.
In our modern times, additional options exist. The goal is to inform the public, so Committees should reach out to the public using various methods, for example:
- Website
- Social media
- Newspaper op-ed
- Letter to the editor
- Newspaper ad
- Flyers
- Bulletin
- etc.
What topics are a valid for a proclamation? Here are some suggestions:
- Identifying Constitutional and natural rights and use specific examples of how they are violated in your area
- Praising or criticizing community leaders for their actions relative to rights
- Making common-sense observations on current events
- Applying Judeo-Christian principles to public policy
A Committee’s proclamations will build over time, creating a de facto platform of common-sense, Constitutional, liberty-minded, Judeo-Christian public policy, which will compare favorably to any political party or institution.
What are the characteristics of a good proclamation? Here are some guidelines:
- Well-written. Use correct grammar. Proofread.
- Concise. Avoid “too long; didn’t read”.
- Firm but polite. Don’t use abusive language, profanity, be mean-spirited, or suggest violence.
- Written in the “royal we”. The author of the proclamation is the Committee, not an individual.
Proclamation Example
The Committee of Correspondence of [your city] declares the following:
Politicians are harming law-abiding families with policies that draw into our neighborhoods the “homeless”, the “unhoused”, the “unsheltered”–all euphemisms for an underground community riddled with drug abuse, petty and violent crime, and mental illness.
According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which costs taxpayers $800 million and employs 700 full-time employees, the county experienced a 26% increase in the population living on our public sidewalks and in parks, with more arriving each year. These habitual lawbreakers are attracted from all over the country thanks to the generous benefits doled out by local officials, who, from inside gated communities protected by private security, neither have to pay for this ruinous policy nor have to live with its consequences. That burden, unfortunately, is placed on the people who this Committee represents—the everyday, hard-working people of Woodland Hills who are trying to run businesses and raise families in a community that politicians have allowed to be overrun with drugs and crime.
It is obvious to clear-thinking people that this problem is driven primarily by those who have chosen a lifestyle of irresponsible drug use over participating in law-abiding society. While we have compassion for the minority that, through no fault of their own, suffer from a mental illness, we cannot include people who are—no matter the cause—a danger to themselves or others in our communities and place these adults’ comfort over the safety of our children.
Therefore, we call for the following:
- For lawmakers to stop attracting criminal elements to our communities with taxpayer-funded handouts
- For local officials to reduce funding for the “poverty industry”, which transfers the wealth away from working people to the non-working poor while failing to lift them out of poverty
- For national officials to secure the border and stop the importation of illegal narcotics
- For cities to enforce existing laws prohibiting camping in public spaces
- For well-meaning Americans who are fortunate enough to be insulated from this blight to not let their sympathy for drug-addicted adults be so great they instead condemn everyday children to live with it
Sincerely,
The Committee of Correspondence of [your city]