A Million Petitions

It seems like as Americans become more and more estranged from their governments at all levels (municipal, State, Federal), an awful lot of them spend a lot of time petitioning for one thing or another.   I'm not talking about people going around knocking on doors to invite me to join them in their effort to get some level of government to either stop doing something or start doing something else.  I'm talking about online petitions and they're all over the place these days.  These email invitations are different than the ones that result in sending an email or fax to my specific elected representatives.   Rather, these are efforts to accumulate thousands of "signatures" on a petition to be delivered to decision makers on a particular topic.


A sampling:  

• "End Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DemocracyForAmerica)
• "Send a Video Message to the President to "say no to a millionaire bailout" (MoveOn.org) (not strictly a petition, but similar enough)
• "Extend Emergency Unemployment Insurance" (AFL/CIO) 
• "Fully Fund NPR (Stand Up To Sarah Palin)" (Credoaction.com)
• "Join the fight against the Republican repeal hypocrisy" (healthcareforamericanow.org)

I have to wonder if most of these petition efforts are more about collecting email and street addresses of people that can be solicited for donations later, than about really effecting change.   

I mean, did Target Corporation really care about the petitions protesting the company's political contributions to right-wing candidates in Minnesota?   I doubt it, and I certainly didn't hear any company reaction to the protests.  The effort to boycott Target didn't seem to have any noticeable effect at my local Target; the parking lot is always filled just as it was before the political donation.  I'm afraid most Americans just don't care if corporations are funneling money into political campaigns, even if the Supreme Court has opened the floodgates to such corporate intrusion into the political system.  Most Americans have been successfully indoctrinated in consumerism, and tend to focus on "Expect More, Spend Less" rather than on how their democracy is being stolen from them.

Is President Obama really going to sit down and watch a few thousand video messages asking him to oppose extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy?   I hope he has a lot more important things to do than waste a week or so doing something like that.  Is this MoveOn.org effort just to make people feel like they're doing something productive, when in reality, they are anything but?

I think that's the core of the issue: making people feel like they are empowered, when in reality, they are definitely not.   I can't believe that anyone in Congress is impressed when presented with electronic petitions bearing tens of thousands of names, especially when there seems to be an epidemic of petitions.   As a decision maker, if you see one or two during the course of a year, you've got to be more impressed than if you're presented with dozens, or hundreds, of petitions.  

As someone who has been elected to our school board several times, I know what is involved in getting actual signatures on an actual nominating petition.   And how difficult it can be to actually get people to sign their name to a piece of paper.  Electronic petitions take no effort and carry corresponding impact.   Little or none.