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." _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=16517