X-Message-Number: 660 Subject: CRYONICS - American Cryonics News 2/2 From: (Edgar W. Swank) Date: Wed, 26 Feb 92 14:16:28 PST AMERICAN CRYONICS NEWS (Reprinted from The Immortalist, February, 1992) - Part 2/2 ACS Members Comment on "Guardians of the Society" We recently asked ACS members for their ideas on forming a special inner core of ACS activists to serve as guardians of the American Cryonics Society. For more details on the guardian concept read John Day's article which follows. We found the comments made by David Crockett of special interest. They are reprinted here: Each guardian should be willing and able to personally bear an equal share of the time and financial burden necessary to insure the survival of ACS through any unforseen crisis (financial or otherwise), or to personally help with the maintenance of suspension patients should ACS be unable to contract for these services, provide these services directly, or cease to exist. Also, along this same line, each guardian should have in mind at least one other person with the same dedication to cryonics who would be willing to make the commitment to replace him should the necessity ever arise. This would insure, at the very least, the survival of the `guardians', and therefore our patients, from generation-to-generation. Guardians of the American Cryonics Society By John Day Who (are/would be) Guardians? In my view, they would be all those members who meet certain very restrictive requirements and who agree to be public members of the society. Their names, addresses, and phone numbers would be made generally available to everyone including the press and all present and prospective members. In fact, the board should be required in the strongest possible way to keep the list of Guardians up-to-date and readily available. What would the Guardians do? I am afraid that the temptation will be great to load responsibilities onto anything that looks the least bit like a group of volunteers. This would certainly be a mistake. A soldier toiling in the trenches is automatically too distracted to simultaneously serve guard duty, and while the situation on a battlefield may take only hours to comprehend, situations evolving within a cryonics society may take years. The best idea is that the Guardians will be without specific responsibilities in the society. They would serve as a tangible bridge between the general membership, the board of governors, the press, and the world at large. Also, by virtue of being independent of the board and contactable by all members, the Guardians would be ideally situated to assist in organizing the membership to check a board gone mad (or bad). By design the Guardians will be dedicated members and I am sure they will initiate activities beneficial to the society, but no particular activity. Discussion of proposed Eligibility Requirements 1. Guardians should beindependent. While the duties of a member ofthe board of governors encompasses the activities of a Guardian I would try to maintain a separation by making service on the board of governors a disqualification with respect to being a Guardian. People do not tend to change their frame of reference overnight and it takes years before a person can have even seen a good sampling of the activities in a cryonics society. If people could become Guardians quickly after joining, it seems likely that they would be influenced by relatively few people and events. I propose that members not be made guardians until two years have passed during which time they are in all other respects continuously qualified. Certainly such a time period should not be shorter than the yearly cycle of board elections, and it would not be good to require much more than a three year waiting period because making changes would become impossibly slow and after all, age confers only some virtues. 2. Guardians should have shown that they are willing and able to support ACS. All kinds of support are needed and valued, but in requiring that a Guardian show support for ACS, the only common denominator is money. The basic test is whether the prospective Guardian contributes a full share to the society above and beyond any special benefits the Society gives back to the Guardian. This should be accounted in an extremely conservative manner(see below) and a net support figure computed if necessary to determine eligibility. To be eligible I think that the total lifetime net support from a Guardian should be at least equal to this amount of $1200. In addition, to maintain eligiblity a Guardian should contribute yearly net support equal to highest dues. This could cause problems in cases where there was anarbitrary choice of which member of a family group was first member and which was second member. To correct any such inequity I would credit all members of a family group with the average initiation fee and dues for the group (on an as paid basis). 3. Guardians should be the purest of the pure. Cryonics is unique in that it involves extremely vulnerable (frozen) people, who have no legal rights, and who must of necessity trust other people to manage large sums of their money toward an end that the core of general society thinks is impossible or improper. It is inherently impossible to protect the Board of Governors from many pressures and temptations that arise in the management and application of suspension funds. It is equally impossible to always choose governors that will resist these pressures and temptations. If the Guardians are to be the consensus of the Board of Governors they should have little direct power over events and be hard to influence. It seems to me a reasonable goal to make rules that keep the Guardians absolutely separated from the money. The definition of a net support concept as used above lends itself to this purpose. I would count only initiation fees, dues, and donations in a members favor. I would not count monies paid on behalf of donations made with any kind of restriction, suspension funds, or any donation of services, materials, or equipment. I would count against a member all monetary payments made to the member. This includes salaries, grants, bonuses, purchase of equipment and supplies, mileage allowances, compensation for use of office space, reimbursement of expenses, and commissions. I would go further and count such payments when made indirectly as by an individual or organization with which ACS does business. Of course, these rules are unreasonably restrictive and a lot of our very best people would be disqualified by their application but it would be a lot easier later to ease off on super conservative, super restrictive rules than to tighten up, rules that have loopholes. With careful wording I see no danger in excluding the purchase of materials and equipment same price. The indirect payments rule should also be modified to apply only when the amount of money going to an intermediate individual or organization is above some threshold of significance (like one percent of sales or salary). 4. Guardians should be tried and true members of ACS. 5. Guardians should be adequate communicators. Most of the time spent by a Guardian is likely to be spent communicating, and much of that time the Guardian will be viewed as representative of the society. It would seem desirable to require that a Guardian have some communication skills but I do not know an objective way to do that, and experience indicates it is not a big problem, so I suggest that we just take whatever we get in this regard. It does, however, seem reasonable to require that a Guardian have a residence telephone and that it be listed in the local phone directory. Yes, to be a Guardian one must give up some privacy. I would neither oppose nor support a requirement of the sort that would require a Guardian speak, read, and write fluently, use specified language(s), or have reached some particular academic level. However, if there is any such requirement, I think that only the prospective Guardian should judge compliance with therequirement. This insures both a kind of objectivity in applying a good rule and the ability to ignore a bad rule. -- (Edgar W. 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