Engaging vs Justifying

This is a great essay on getting the public back through actually really really engaging them that captures a LOT of the things I've been thinking of lately. A quote:

"By identifying with the players, by caring about what they care about, by seeing their world and what’s unfolding in it through their eyes and with their feelings, the audience becomes emotionally linked with a story’s characters and their motivations. When that happens, the story becomes the audience’s story, the conflict their conflict—this is the magic of becoming “caught up” in a story. With a good storyteller to guide us, we can’t help but share in this experience whether it is by book, movie, or well-crafted documentary. Participation in storytelling is as firmly ingrained in our nature—no, probably more so—than that deep-down desire to explore which we in the spaceflight community so often cite.

Thus, the task before us is to get a larger percentage of the public caught up in the story of real spaceflight again (support for spaceflight will follow naturally) by emotionally linking them to the people on the inside who are having all the fun."

And another statement he attributes to his father (I've believed this since even before I started having teachers who were more interested, well, pretty much anything, than they were in actually teaching students new information):

“If you can’t explain something to a ten-year-old then you don’t understand it yourself.”

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Taking the other point of not engaging, but justifying (really well), is a good speech by Mike Griffin. A quote:

"Let's think for a moment about national security. What is the value to the United States of being involved in enterprises which lift up human hearts everywhere when we do them? What is the value to the United States of being engaged in such projects, doing the kinds of things that other people want to do with us, as partners? What is the value to the United States of being a leader in such efforts, in projects in which every nation capable of doing so wants to take part? I would submit that the highest possible form of national security, well above having better guns and bombs than everyone else, well above being so strong that no one wants to fight with us, is the security which comes from being a nation which does the kinds of things that make others want to work with us to do them. What security could we ever ask that would be better than that, and what gives more of it to us than the space program?"

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Sterling, one day will you write me a space engineer/astronaut TV pilot? Pretty please?