“Why Are You Here?”
It’s an existential question for sure… but not like “Why are you here on this planet?”, or “Why are you here in this country?”
More like, “Why are you on this particular mailing list and/or website?”
I ask, because we’d really like to ramp up activity here… and we’d like your help.
This platform, Substack, is mostly writers, analysts, pundits, and artists. It’s pretty cool. Lots of folks have built great followings, support, and community on Substack. People are making a living in new ways. The internet can be so freaking cool.
We’re different, here, at Shift the Country. We do a little bit of analysis. There’s some art, and perspective.
At the heart, though, we’re a nonprofit fixing to energize the majority of Americans. This democracy would and could work so much better if we could get huger majorities out voting. And we can.
We’re fixing to create a movement; a phenomenon. We’re here to foment, grow, catalyze, and amplify.
It’s audacious. It’s bold. It will be organic, messy, and decentralized. It’s going to take a lot of volunteer effort; a lot of sharing stuff around. A lot of contribution. A lot of big ideas and big energy and big hope and big vision.
I think it’s got tremendous potential… but then I’m the founder. I might be a bit biased.
Mostly, I think it’s reachable. We can do big things. So… let’s do this one.
Are you here for the movement? For the change? For the catalyzing?
You don’t have to drive it.
We’re just asking if you’re here for it. To participate. To be a part of the journey. To follow or to lead or to listen or to be supportive. We’re going to need all the things. We’re going to need big brains, openness, authenticity, and faith in humans.
I ask because we’re about to ramp stuff up… big time.
We’d Love Your Engagement
We’d like your help. We’d love your engagement. There are a zillion possibilities here. We want to create the space for people to come together and do amazing things.
We’ve got six weeks of Zoom calls scheduled to start. We’ll set up more after that depending on what works and what we need.
You can help us now by recruiting friends and family to one of the Zoom calls, or to a few. Here’s the announcement post, too.
We’re working on a few different tracks so we’ve got visible action around the country by summer - like creating a summer ruckus, building coalitions, and going after business pressure.
We start… we get creative… we build some stuff… and then we build on that… and then we build on that. We support each other as we go. We build bigger coalitions and find more amplifiers.
It’s doable.
As we build traction, bring people in, and bring in funding to advertise… we should be able to grow our influence and reach. To get into gossip networks in local communities. To get people putting more and different viral content online. To help politicians, leaders, and each other to be out in front more with more moral courage and more media coverage…. but also to have tough conversations behind the scenes. To drive more of the narrative where we live.
We should be able to raise some kind of a ruckus.
If we do it right, it’s going to start getting way busier up on this site. More posts, more activity, more ideas, more guests, more success, and more stories. Podcasts. Video. The whole nine yards.
If we do it right… we might even pass through “Hyperactive” and go straight to “Ludicrous Speed:”
To quote from another movie, Serenity… “Somebody has to speak for these people…. Now I’m asking more of you than I have before.”
It’s time to go all out. Going to take a while, but we can get there. We are more than a year and a half before the 2024 election. How many voters can we reach, inspire, energize, and mobilize before then? How much kerfuffle and noise and buzz could we create even by this summer?
Won’t know until we do it.
So as my old fire chief boss used to say, “Let’s went.”