Please note “ADDITIONS” at the end of this post;

INFLUENCING

Every now and then a new word crops up and has its day in the headlines.  A current one is “Influencer“.  If you search the internet you will find numerous definitions.  Here’s one I selected, from the Oxford English Dictionary.

Today, it seems, you have to go viral to consider something successful.  Or have a very large boatload of “followers”. whatever that means.

I want to propose a new definition of “influencer”: first each person has to convince him or herself that he or she can make a difference as an active individual wherever he or she lives….

Since November 2024, when my ‘side’ ‘lost’ the election, I have said that 75,000,000 of us agreed on an alternative outcome, but we were a tiny bit short of a plurality.  There was no “landslide” “victory” or “loss” last November.  Every one of us were “influencers”.

Of course this also means that 77 million influencers voted for the opposing candidate, as were the 90 million or so who didn’t vote at all, or the free who voted for minor party candidates with no chance of being elected.

In short, every single one of us who were qualified to vote, whether voting or not, is the only ‘influencer’ who makes any difference.

If each person takes on the task of helping one other person make up their mind, change can happen pretty dramatically…there is no ‘yah but’.

As we’re all learning the hard way, elections are no spectator sport.  All of us are the “team”, period.

*

Re the Team, I’m really no different than anyone else.  First, I have to talk myself into taking some unfamiliar action – in other words, to change customary behaviors.

The viral bunch is always an annoying noise in the background, like those fine-tuned ads for the perfect pet food for the perfect dog or cat.

For all of us, perfection is a dream, and we clomp along trying to do our best.

My challenge, become an influencer, just by doing a little bit more every day, getting a little out of your comfort zone.

You read this this far.  You are an exceptional person.  Keep on keeping on.

POSTNOTE: As I was drafting this I thought back to a workshop I’d attended in Grand Rapids MN in the late 1980’s.  The speaker, Don Keck, was an organizer for the National Education Association, and his talk was about Power,  In my memory, his talk had five bullet points about Power and who has it.  The first four were obvious: Knowledge, Position, Money, Information.  There were other sources of power, but these were primary examples.

It was the final power that caught my attention, and that he spent the most time with: Referent Power, the power of relationships, which he called “Referent Power”..

In my blog archives, there are nine that include the word “Referent” in one way or another, At the end of my post for February 10, 2011, I expanded a bit on the word, as follows:

Message to the Proles March 10 2010: ** – Power defined. I once heard an excellent talk about some of the many kinds of “Power” in plays in all of our lives. As I remember them: there is the power that comes with authority (“I can fire you”, or variations usually involving money); there is the power that comes with the capability of defining the rules of society (“I can make laws”). Power comes with family connections – a family marries into a family with power. The list goes on.
But there was one power I paid most attention to, and the speaker called it “referent power” or “the likeability factor”. For people immersed in the other kinds of power, this is the scary one: this is the problem of relationships, and builds outside, and independent of, the others.

ADDITIONAL SUGGESTIONS: 

Some things you can do:

Facilitate registering to vote: Joyce Vance October 7, 2025

Check out and participate in No Kings Day on October 18.  In the lower left corner of the home page is a box.  Enter your zip code and find the nearest group in your area.

Check out “No data day” here.

Lori Sturdevant, long time highly respected commentator on politics in this area, had a must read column in the October 8 Minnesota Star Tribune: Lori Sturdevant STrib 10 8 25

I have added several references after “Do something” in the Darkness or Light post.