I want to tell a story - the story the numbers below are whispering to me. It's about (don't laugh too loudly now) the hoped for second coming of Camelot. And people who had never before participated in the realm of politics, but who were aware of great villains, and a great hope, and started to pay attention. If Daily Kos had been in existence during the JFK campaign, I suspect the numbers would have looked a lot like these.
And then the great hope was elected, and the great villains deposed, but there were still no heroes, and the people who had hoped for heroes, for the most part, went back to their ordinary, non-political lives. And a reality based website couldn't offer enough of a new mythos to overcome the prosaic day to day quibbles and squabbles of politics. In the meantime, the courtiers from the court of the great villains worked mightily on their counter-mythos, and nibbled gently away at the hopes of those remaining.
It may not be the responsibility of Daily Kos to create visions to spark the multitudes, or heroes to populate those visions, but if you must take the number of working diarists as a key to the site's impact, then it behooves us to build new dreams, rather than allowing despair to get its nose under the tent flap. There do seem to be more and more people out there hoping that someone can manage it. We need to bring the dreamers in, and cut them some slack while they get on their feet.
Reality is always with us, no matter how much some of us may try to avoid it. To take reality and build a workable positive mythos, a workable vision, around it - that's lacking right now, and it's needed. We don't need a thousand more diaries a month about what's wrong with the system, we need a solid few describing what's right, and how to work on making it better, or changing it so that it's possible. Without heroes, please - they always disappoint.
1st half of 2007 - 7790 diaries/month average
2nd half of 2007 - 8112 diaries/month average
Don't look at me - if I knew how to do what I'm calling for, I would. Just hoping that this might spark something in the people who can.