What do I want for Christmas?

You guessed it – money. Not for myself – I’ll never take a nickel for my contribution to the Good Morning Project – but for our joint enterprise.

I say joint because readers are crucial to our success. Readers amplify writers’ voices into something audible. Quantity of readers, no less than quality of utterance, begets power.

Six months ago, when this experiment in audience growth commenced, the Good Morning Project had 480 subscribers, mostly friends and friends of friends. I undertook the experiment because I felt I owed my moment any good I might accomplish. I expected a piddling result and the satisfaction of having tried.

Today Good Morning Project has twenty-two thousand subscribers and is growing at a rate of more than a hundred newcomers a day. That’s an increase of 4,483 per cent in six months (but who’s counting?). If we maintain that rate of growth – and we’ve no indication yet that we won’t – we’ll be reaching half a million readers a few months before America’s national election, which (whatever its outcome) must profoundly affect the future of mankind.

And you are not just any readers, interchangeable for Harry Potter fans. You enjoy literate writing. You believe in truth, justice, grace, mercy, beauty, common sense and are distraught at our national misdirection. While scattered like grains of pepper across a wide geography, together you embody a force for reform, sanity, decency. Yes, we are an advocacy group. We advocate civility, humility, truth, good versus evil, a livable world for our kids. And – a big surprise for many of us – we are not alone – and we find consolation in our conversation.

I never sought this post. I wrote for pleasure and to jaw with pals. But then I asked myself, as America collapsed around me, if I might play such a role, am I not duty-bound to try? My consistent encouragement to friends during this dismal decade has been “Do all you can.” I’m too old to run for office, not rich enough to fund a PAC, but I do write – a lot – and if my writing helps our common cause, oughtn’t I suit up and contribute what I can to the Propagation of our Faith? Shouldn’t we all do what we can and not just tear our hair?

Where did we locate these new subscribers? That’s where the money comes in. We spiffed up the presentation of my words, making them more attractive to window-shoppers on the Web. And we paid money to Facebook to find us like-minded souls among their three billion users.

Here’s the math. A new free subscriber costs us about a buck each. The likelihood that subscriber will convert to paid is currently about two percent. One paid subscription of eighty dollars thus yields 80 free subscribers or 1.6 paid subscribers, yielding $120 in revenue, which we plough back into attracting new subscribers for a buck each. This crazy dynamic explains our explosive audience growth.

I’m not shilling for Facebook here. I distrust the medium. But if they can generate such growth at such cost, more power to them!

The more you contribute, the greater our audience, the greater our influence. Simple as that. Give five or five hundred dollars, any amount helps and widens our community of donors. Let’s magnify our murmur into a shout, our concerns into a chorus. Notwithstanding the insistence of the Nameless One and his goons, morality still matters; it is not the pathetic piping of weaklings. The Sermon on the Mount, Constitution and Gettysburg Address still matter. If we are not good, what good are we?