"I just had the pleasure of reading your Aug 16 column" (on the harassment of Miami's Joe's Stone Crab by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.) "However, without providing/allowing a general public response to the people that cause these things to happen, you're nothing more that a noisy gong; you're preaching to the choir; flapping in the wind (like the rest of us).

"Would it be to much to ask for you to include a statement at the end of each of your articles that reads something like:

" 'If this bothers you, write to: Appropriate Person, Street Address, Somewhere, USA, and express your feelings (politely)'?"

I replied:

Although I will occasionally list an address to send funds, or ordering info for a book, or contacts for a relevant and admirably principled organization (The Fully-Informed Jury Association, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, Forfeiture Endangers American Rights, the Separation of School and State Alliance), I purposely do NOT do what you suggest.

Your implication is that if a reader writes to some government administrator, or his or her own congressman, it will do some good.

Let's stipulate that if they receive a thousand such letters they might "pull" or delay passage of some measure until the heat dies down ... though it'll be back under a different name, never fear.

But outweighing that, at least two BAD things can happen: 1) The letter writer gets added to a list of "anti-government extremists," which will bring a visit from two FBI "suits," or an IRS audit, or the first ATF inspection in years of your FFL license.

This is not mere paranoia. Red Hafter, a champion Olympic pistol marksman from Arizona , recently wrote to his senator, John McCain, to protest the assault weapons ban. McCain promptly forwarded that letter to the BATF -- proudly informing the 73-year-old Mr. Hafter he had thus "taken care of the matter." Within weeks, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms visited Red for the first audit in decades of his Federal Firearms License. (Yes, those guilty of record-keeping errors have actually been JAILED.)

2) But the even worse thing likely to happen, is that the letter-writer's anger is thus ASSUAGED. He or feel she has "done something about that problem." With the anger thus vented, he washes his hands of the matter.

The problem is that we have gone far past the point when letters will do any good. You are merely providing the phrases they will test out in their "focus groups" and feed back to you. All that will do any good now (short of violent revolution or secession, which I do not yet endorse) is a much more active and widespread application of the principles of civil disobedience or resistance. For that to happen, people's anger and outrage have to BUILD ... not be vented in fruitless mouthings, about as effective as kicking your stalled car.

So, please don't write any letters. Instead, GET MAD. And then figure out some way -- hopefully a way that will not put you, your family, or even the evil bureaucrats and tyrants themselves in the way of any real bodily harm (yet) -- to disobey, to monkey-wrench, to flout, to RESIST.

This can be as "minor" as figuring out ways to store your family's wealth in gold (untracked and unsupervised by any government agency), rather than subsidizing and patronizing the regulated banks which have become government-agencies-by-extension, with accounts which the government can track or seize at will. (Thumbprint required for check-cashing? Consider marketing a flesh-colored plastic glue-on for people's thumbs, carefully scribed with the authentic thumbprint of John Dillinger. As long as there's no criminal intent ...)

The government tries to ban firearms? Make it your personal mission to stockpile 10 times more firearms -- and 100 times more ammo -- than your granddad ever did, and to teach five more citizens how to pick out and shoot a militia-style "assault rifle."

The government wants to stack juries with pro-government stooges? Instead of trying to get out of jury duty, shuffle down there in a bowling shirt, play dumb, and get empaneled. If you're convinced the accused is actually a violent predator who hurt a real, human victim, then of course your must throw the book at the SOB. But if he's merely being railroaded for standing up on principle against some bureaucratic edict, doing things that wouldn't even have BEEN against the law 90 years ago, then argue to acquit, or (at the very least) HANG THAT JURY, as is your right ... and the defendant's.

For a much longer list of suggestions, I suggest Claire Wolfe's "101 Things to Do Till the Revolution," from Loompanics Unlimited, P.O. Box 1197, Port Townsend, Wash. 98368, at $20.90 postpaid, volume discounts available (loompseditor@olympus.net.)