X-Message-Number: 16517
From: "Mark Plus" <>
Subject: The message few people are receiving.
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 20:51:42 -0700

This may seem off-topic, but bear with me:

I wish to state at the outset that I was peripherally affected by  l'affaire 
McVeigh.  My aunt, Frances Williams, worked for HUD in Oklahoma City, and 
died in the bombing of the Murrah Building.  She was the daughter of my 
grandmother and her second husband, making her my father's half-sister.

I am ambivalent about McVeigh's execution, for I would argue that while 
capital punishment may be necessary in weak societies, where justice is 
precarious, in stronger societies we can afford to keep people like McVeigh 
locked up for life.  After all, John Gotti has been kept incommunicado 
during his imprisonment, and the same could have been done to McVeigh for 
the rest of his life so that we wouldn't have to listen to his political 
pronouncements and rationalizations for mass murder.

That aside, however, while watching some of the news coverage about the 
execution, I saw something on CNN this evening which made me reflect on the 
hard but necessary tasks ahead of us.  An actor, a playwright and a magazine 
editor were discussing the public's fascination with McVeigh's execution, 
and they all agreed that part of the fascination derived from the fact that 
death is the "common fate" of all.

The whole cryonics enterprise has arisen in response to this persistent evil 
in the human condition, basing itself on the assumption that progress in 
science, medicine and technology will turn aging, degenerative diseases and 
death into humanly solvable problems.  Cryonics has defined its immediate 
challenge as giving the currently dying a kind of ambulance ride to that 
conjectured future with its superior trauma medicine.  (This of course 
doesn't address the safety and integrity of that ambulance ride, which I am 
not able to evaluate at this time.)

And, for once, it looks like some of the major tools for this greatest of 
all thinkable achievements are coming into existence.  Genetic engineering, 
cloning, stem-cell engineering, gerontology and now advances in brain 
vitrification suggest approaches towards the solution that would have seemed 
like science fiction just a few years ago.  These developments are starting 
to affect the practice of today's medicine.  For example, _Time_ magazine 
recently ran a cover story about how certain cancers are becoming manageable 
as chronic diseases instead of the life-threatening emergencies they had 
been previously.

The trouble is, while this trend is clear to people like us, who have 
studied these developments and have been thinking about their implications 
for years, in general the people in developed societies haven't been able to 
connect the dots.  The guests on that CNN show are no doubt bright and 
knowledgeable in their way about the humanities and social-political things, 
but what they were saying about death in the 21st Century could have been 
just as likely uttered by Socrates, Gotama or Confucius ages ago.

I see an urgent need to articulate and promulgate the message that we are 
living in an historically unprecedented time.  The "rules" for the human 
condition are being re-written on almost a daily basis, and it's time to 
educate, if possible, people away from their received notions about human 
potentials.

The trouble is, I don't have a clue about how to do this, especially given 
the illiteracy, aliteracy and anti-intellectualism now dominant in our 
culture.  Moreover, I have reluctantly concluded that persuasion and 
argument are ineffective in breaking through the autistic worldview bubbles 
adults live in, so the only sort of thing that might stand a chance in 
changing people's thinking and behavior is a dramatic demonstration that our 
view of the future is realistic and plausible.

Trans-millennially yours,

Mark Plus, Expansionary
"Working to make death obsolescent in the 21st Century."


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