Last week, I posted a diary about my White House petition for gun control. It provoked good discussion in the comments, of which there were over 200, and it made it to the rec list for about 24 hours from 12/30 - 12/31/12. It was cross-posted to Repeal or Amend the Second Amendment and Kossack Initiated White House Petition feeds. Yet here we are a week later, and it only has about 50 signatures.
I wasn't expecting the DKos community to push it over the 25,000 signatures needed for a response. But I was expecting to at least make the 150 to make it public on the White House website if the diary was successful... I know my request, to allow the CPSC to handle the consumer safety aspects of firearms, and to study gun safety and gun violence on a national level through this organization, may not be the best solution. I know it's not the only solution. There are plenty of other valid petitions on the site, and plenty of other discussions worth having.
But the thing with the petitions are, you're not voting solely for your one favorite. If you think my petition will help, at all, please sign it! Unless you actively think it's a bad idea, I can't think of a downside to signing the petition.
In a more broad sense, the DKos community is huge and our chance to work together to create viable, useful action is also huge! I've been a lurker for years, with infrequent postings and comments. I know that the majority of members are probably happy to read the main page or focus on our favorite issue, comment here and there like I do, and don't fault anyone for that. We all have our busy lives and many other things fighting for out attention. And as someone who has volunteered for a variety of political campaigns, I know that it does require some dedicated time and commitment to do things like call voters, go door-to-door, etc. I know that would be tough to coordinate across a large Internet community.
But when it comes to signing online petitions to the White House, it only takes about 2 minutes to create an account, and once you have an account it takes about 15 seconds to sign a petition. So this isn't just a call to action for my petition, but for DKos petitions of all kinds. Again, I'm not asking for mindless groupthink. If you think a petition is a bad idea, then don't sign it. But unless that's the case, I don't see why we can't support each other and use the power and size of our community to help all Kossack Initiated White House Petitions cross the 150 signature milestone at the very least.
I would guess it would only take a vocal minority of the community to cross the 25,000 milestone too! And while that only guarantees a response, and not meaningful action, from the White House, it would publicize issues our community cares about and the 15 seconds of individual effort is probably worth such a return.
And to make clear, I think Daily Kos is a great community of progressives with a variety of opinions and full of interesting discussion every time I come here. But part of why I became a less frequent visitor to this site after 2008 is I feel we have a lot of talk here but not necessarily actions representative of the community's size. We can easily donate lots of money to ActBlue and other good, progressive campaigns. But I'm not sure I've seen any other large-scale actions.
Signing White House petitions are just as easy as donating to a campaign, and free to boot! So won't you help me in proving Daily Kos is a community of action in addition to words?