WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO SIGN "THIS I BELIEVE"?
When a majority of Americans sign "This I Believe" the world will change because we'll be able to get off the treadmill of defeat. No longer will we be trapped into waging defensive struggles just to keep things from getting worse or just to make a small improvement that will get taken away from us before long by the rich who remain in power.
Instead we will be able to forge a movement hundreds of millions strong, a movement that gains strength (enough to win!) from having an explicit and profoundly inspiring goal: to make a fundamentally better world--an egalitarian world--where the rich are removed from power and there's real, not fake, democracy and there are no rich and no poor. Here's why this will happen when we get a majority of Americans to sign "This I Believe."
The main obstacle today in the United States that prevents people from acting together on a large scale to challenge the power of the ruling elite (Big Money, plutocracy, establishment, or whatever one wants to call them) is that people feel it is hopeless to even try. Hopelessness comes, for most people, from believing that there is no better alternative to our current society based on class inequality. Even when people discover that there IS a much better alternative--egalitarianism--hopelessness continues to come from feeling virtually alone in having the revolutionary aspirations for an egalitarian society that are expressed in "This I Believe."
THE OBSTACLE TO EGALITARIAN REVOLUTION IS NOT THAT MOST PEOPLE DON'T WANT IT (THEY'D LOVE IT!); THE OBSTACLE IS THAT MOST PEOPLE DON'T KNOW THAT MOST PEOPLE WANT IT.
If we had mass organizations with explicitly stated revolutionary egalitarian goals, then people would not feel alone and hopeless. But we don't currently have such organizations, and until people see the egalitarian alternative and stop feeling alone in wanting it they will not have the confidence to start creating revolutionary organizations. But when most Americans know that most Americans have signed "This I Believe" and know that they are in the majority in wanting an egalitarian revolution they will no longer feel alone. They will have the confidence to start acting like the majority they actually are, by taking concrete steps to build a revolutionary movement with revolutionary organizations.
By signing "This I Believe" and having their signature displayed publicly, a person can help make this happen. When this happens, we can build a revolutionary movement hundreds of millions strong, a movement that is so confident in its strength, so clear on its enormously inspiring goal and so determined to succeed that it can persuade a critical mass of members of the American military forces to not only refuse to obey orders to attack the revolutionary movement, but to use their weapons to help defend it from those who would attack it. In other words, we will be able to make a successful revolution, to remove the plutocracy (Big Money) from power and finally have a real opportunity to start creating an egalitarian society the way good and decent people think is reasonable, fair and morally right.
Even in the short term, it is vitally important that people struggling against Big Money over any one of countless grievances--be it a harmful budget cut or low wages or pollution of the environment or unemployment or inferior education in working class public schools or anything else--sign "This I Believe." Why? Because "This I Believe" says why people wage their struggle in a way that millions of other Americans will relate to and say, "Yes! Those people are fighting for the same thing I am fighting for. We're all in this together."