So, Who's ready for YK 2007?!

Thanks to Kos' linking to this post by Jeffrey Feldman I got to read an amazing post about YearlyKos and about the whole netroots movement. His description of the netroots movement as a whole new political movement built on trust was very powerful, and I recommend that everyone read it.

It made me think about my lurker status though, and what made me a lurker. For me the community here at DailyKos is like a huge house in a rainstorm. It's warm inside, and the windows look oh so inviting, I know the house, I see it every day, but I never get much further than the porch. I gaze inside looking at all of these people and the incredible thing they've built, I draw support from it, I see this community based on trust, but I can't bring myself to join it all the way. I want to, but something stops me, fear.

Not fear of the community per se, but the fear I've developed as a liberal whose heart has been broken too many times before. After the elections of 2000 and 2004 I imagine many of us found it hard to trust anything that seemed to offer a ray of sunshine on the bleak political landscape. There've been so many failed hopes.

The 2000 election was the first presidential election that I voted in. The disappointment I got from the degree to which my vote seemed not to matter, well, it's hard to go into. I think if anyone understands it, it's this community.

So this community of trust is very appealing, but it's a little scary. Even today it's often hard to believe that we can bring about change, that anything can be done. I think it can, and the more I read DailyKos, the more I feel that we can do something. There's a common sentiment out there among Americans. We watch something bad happen and we say to ourselves, "boy, that's terrible, I hope somebody does something about that." And we go back to our lives. The more I read DailyKos the more I react to things with a different thought, "boy, that's terrible, I should do something about that." This is a huge paradigm shift. I like to think that DailyKos brings it about in more of us every day.

I'd been planning on volunteering for a while, but always some vague time in the future.  Now I know exactly when, and the when is now.

Why is this? Because of DailyKos, and right now because of YearlyKos. Reading all of the incredibly inspired diaries by people who went has made me increasingly bitter about not going. Next year, I have promised myself, I will go.

There have been a lot of posts this week from lurkers posting for the first time, because of YearlyKos. I guess I'm one of them. There's an amazing swell of momentum coming out of this conference. Everyone seems to have brought it home with them, and now you're posting it all back onto DailyKos. It's a powerful thing, and it has a pretty amazing ability to build off itself. I didn't even go to this conference, but it lit a fire under me. Now I have to do things. DailyKos was a spark for me in the darkness before. Now it's a bonfire.