My own sense is, worrying about TKD's image is both futile and, if you're really devoted to it, unnecessary. The futility is evident: look at the number of threads on MT, let alone other, let's say more belligerent boards, where someone gets on and starts badmouthing TKD for all the usual reasons, and we all send in these detailed posts about TKD's military record and effective technical repertoire and so on, with full citations of sources, and they spout back a lot of misinformation and narrow understanding based on what they know of sport TKD, and back and forth it goes, until finally you either get a kind of grudging acknowledgement that there might be more to it, or else a stubborn `don't confuse me with facts, I've made up my mind' sort of response, and basically the thread dies. Now that's with one person. When you talk about `image', you're talking about hundreds of thousands or millions of MA practitioners who are little different from the guy on the thread. And it's probably also true that any changes you might make on a worldwide basis that would `improve the image' of TKD would take a decade or more to sink into mass consciousness. So at best, at this point, it's an uphill battle. It took a couple of generations for TKD to reach its current low level of public esteem, and it would probably take at least as long, no matter what you did, to change that situation. (Karate is, so far as I can see, in the same boat with TKD in this respect, so it's not as though we're all alone here).
But the more important point, I think, is in the question, why should anyone care what the public estimate of TKD is? What difference does it make to what you do? This is what I've been thinking for a long time about that question: it's not something you have to ask people about their taste in ice cream, say. If your favorite flavor is burgundy cherry, you couldn't care less that most people prefer vanilla or butter pecan. That's totally, completely irrelevant to what you buy at the store. If you like Baroque music, you couldn't care less that more bubble-gum music CDs are sold in a single day than 18th century music CDs sell in a whole year. And so on: the point is, your taste in anything doesn't require you to believe something about whatever it is in order to feel good about it. The pleaure comes from the taste of the ice cream or the sound of the music; they themselves are all the justification we need. But it's not like that about the MAs we do, at least not if we're worrying about image. So to me, that says that we aren't doing the MAs we do simply for the pleasure of doing them—not if we worry about what people think of them. That anxiety about other people's perception seems to me to say that we may ourselves harbor some doubts about what we're doing—in a way we simply do not harbor doubts about our favorite ice cream or music—and we don't like the fact that we're not getting external support, in the form of others' good opinions, that might reassure us that our art is really the effective fighting system we'd like to think it is.
If the real problem of TKD's image—or Karate's, or Gung Fu's—is that its practitioners are too concerned with other people's views because of their own latent doubts, then real remedy is for people to eliminate those doubts by shifting their training to a format which will allow the intrinsic effectiveness of the art to emerge. If we could magically bring the RoK White Tiger commandos from the Vietnam War era into the present with their battlefield combat skills intact, I somehow doubt that they's be particularly worried about how people viewed their fighting system; after all, no other MA has ever been pressure tested under the real `ultimate fighting championship' conditions—survival on free-fire front line or behind-the-lines battlefields when you're out of ammo or separated from your weapon—on the mass scale, over two decades. Those Korean soldiers would probably have been just as happy, in fact, to have their fighting arts dismissed by the enemy; nothing like having the opposition fatally underestimate you, eh? It's not a mistake that either the North Koreans or the Viet Cong made, in fact, but the point is, what the guys in the White Tiger units were likely concerned with, and solely concerned with, was the effectiveness of their training for killing the enemy in empty-hand CQ fighting. If it worked for that, what difference would it make what anyone else thought?
My feeling is that we would do better to adopt that attitude ourselves, rather than worry excessively about the media-created image that TKD suffers from. It doesn't really affect our training on an individual level, or our ability to defend ourselves from a violent street attack, does it? If those things are OK, and we know it, why would we worry about what anyone else thinks?
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