My response to comments from this topic here: http://www.longecity...__fromsearch__1
Enthusiasm doesn't really capture the essence of what we do here. Enthusiasts have sail boats and collect model trains. We are activists in an important, life or death world cause. Some people may see us as enthusiasts, but we have to act like activists, and call ourselves that if we want to be recognized further and wider for what we are. The women and men meeting at the great women's conventions of the early 20th century, for example, weren't enthusiasts, they were key, reformation catalyzing activists.Either way, it's about inviting participation of the wider masses, rather than just a narrow bunch of enthusiasts.
That is one strategy, the slow road strategy. There are a lot of movements that face that sort of crossroads. In the civil rights movement, for example, the NAACP would continuously tell people like Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernanthy, Rosa Parks and Ella Baker that they were moving too fast, that they should slow down and let civil rights policies work their way through the courts and the newspapers. They tried that, to get the other half of their rights, after the civil war, and it took them another 100 years of court action, Plessy vs Ferguson, ravid unchecked racism and Jim Crow laws before they finally had to be willing to take the hard road to getting it done.Nowadays, you have to avoid selling cures as strategies for life extension to get funding. That's how it is, and it won't change for the time being. It's the people in minority, like us, that have to adjust, not the other way around.
It is our job to bring the message of indefinite life extension to the rest of the world no matter how hard it is. They don't not support this because they won't, they don't support this yet because they don't understand the need for it yet, they don't know the resources that can make it happen are even available, and they haven't been catalyzed to action yet. It is our job to bring those things to them. They will adjust, slowly but surely they will adjust. There is a guide on how and why it will get through to them here: http://www.longecity...the-uninformed/
We won't get them all at once, but we won't ever get them to put the support in this cause that is required to reach the goal of unlimited lifespans in our lifetimes if we never tell them, or we only tell a small percent of them. Its hard to be willing to stand out for whats right, you look like a sore thumb and can take a real critical beating for it, but a concept that is true cannot be perpetually ignored if you keep it propped up out in the open and you don't give in. More and more people slowly think about it enough and come to understand, and follow your lead and join you over time, the cause support grows through larger and larger stages of growth, and that's how you get there.
Edited by brokenportal, 11 March 2012 - 07:16 AM.
