Just FYI

For a number of personal/health/job/blah-blah-blah reasons, posting here is going to be a bit irregular for a while. Since I believe that most of you who are regulars check in no more than 2-3 times a week (which is entirely reasonable), it probably won't make a whole lot of difference to you, so this is just, like I said, FYI.

I admit that one reason for this is another recurrence of wondering just how much I'm accomplishing here and frustration at my low traffic. Not long ago, one of the blogs I read celebrated the fact that it had gotten its 500,000^th hit, that in less than a year. At the rate I'm going now, I won't live long enough to see that total. And yes, that can be discouraging. My energy level for blogging is pretty low right now.

Now, I know for a number of people, blogging, even political blogging, is purely a personal thing, sometimes just - by which I mean solely, not merely - a way to kick around events and ideas with a few friends. So traffic means little to them. And that's fine; I make no criticism of that intention.

It's just that that's not what Lotus was intended to be, not my hope for it. I wanted it to be something of use, something of value. Someone once offered what they intended as friendly criticism of the print version of Lotus, saying it was "marginal" and needed more "objectivity" to persuade. I replied by saying that the aim of Lotus is

to rouse and inspire, to provide background and analysis intended to put a context to ethical judgments and thereby spur action.

(I quoted this same passage at greater length here.)

In fact, in the very first issue of Lotus, I spelled out my hopes and intentions.

Several years ago, a friend asked me for some background information she could use for a presentation on world hunger she'd been talked into giving at her church. She confessed to being very nervous about doing it and said she envied my ease at giving speeches.

I answered that I envied her gregariousness, how comfortable she was one-on-one with strangers, a quality that gave her skill in door-to-door petitioning. I'd always found the prospect of going to a street where I knew no one and knocking on strange door after strange door, political petition in my hand and earnest expression on my face, rather intimidating.

She half-smiled and said something about how that didn't seem anything special or "important." The truth is, I'm not sure she believed me.

But I meant what I said. Because every one of us has his or her own strengths, has something we can contribute to the struggle for peace, for justice, for the environment, for, in short, life. Despite the eternal - and, to my mind, eternally boring - debates about the "best" tactic or the "best" organizing style or the "most effective" approach, the fact is that none of these abilities is inherently more important than any other. All are important, all are necessary, and the question isn't whether your particular skills are "better" or "worse" than any others but whether or not you're using them.

Some, like my friend, are good at petitioning. I'm not. Some are good at fundraising. I'm not. I lack both the focused concentration necessary for large-scale organizing and the patience for phone-banking. The list of my inadequacies is embarrassingly long.

My strength happens to be words. Advocacy. Writing. Giving speeches. And like that. So doing this is, simply, something I think I can contribute. My dream for Lotus is that it can be a voice of conscience and a tool in an on-going movement, something of use to the many who keep on keepin' on, something of value to those whose skills in other areas so greatly exceeds mine. Something that helps.

That's still the idea; it's always been the idea: to be of value, to contribute something to advancing the causes and convictions in which I believe. No, I don't expect to be Atrios, I don't even want to be. (Neither, frankly, do I want to be a blog that has posts that consist of "Oy!" with a link.) I'm not looking to get tens of thousands of hits a day, nor am I looking to have devotees who will check in several times a day to see what if anything I've posted in the last hour. But, say, a few hundred regular readers coming by maybe two or three times a week? That would satisfy both my ego and my need to feel I'm accomplishing something.

Right now neither of those is getting the strokes they want. One reason for that, one that I can do something about immediately, is to look to doing more in-depth posts, with more background, about things that move me, especially if it's a topic that I think hasn't been blogged to death or on which I can at least claim to have some different perspective. That is, to reprise the theme, something useful. I know I've talked about this before, but I think I've finally started to move in that direction; I've had some reasonable facsimilies of that sort of post over the past few weeks, such as this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one.

I know I'm never going to turn into David Neiwert, with a blog almost exclusively filled with long essays; I like the quick hits and my "geek" posts too much. But I do think that fewer, more if you will resource-laden posts, resource in the sense of background and analysis, will serve the purpose better.

So the bottom line of all this rambling is that right now there are some personal pressures and I'm feeling rather discouraged while in the midst of a slow shift in my approach to this blog. The result is that, again, my blogging energy level is rather low. So yes, I will be posting, but quite probably not every day. Let me know what you think of things as they develop.