TREK’S TRUE INSPIRATION

TREK’S TRUE INSPIRATION

When I was just a little girl in the 1960s, and watched Star Trek with my parents, Daddy and I used to later discuss how tremendously inspiring the show was, and how it just might manage to finally enlighten people. In those days, as now, not everyone could appreciate the value of the space program, and not everyone realized just how vital to our species’ very survival it would be. Movies like Meteor, Deep Impact, and Armageddon had not yet been filmed, and the average Joe was basically unaware of how terribly vulnerable we were, in confining humanity to just one planet. Daddy had always been a far-thinker, way ahead of his time; he knew how easily we could go the way of the dinosaurs, and he imparted all of his brilliant observations to me, his fascinated young daughter. His wisdom encompassed even more than our survival as a species; he foresaw that humanity could become something very special, that we didn’t have to just settle for being what author Robert A. Heinlein whimsically termed “groundhogs,” that we could truly amount to something in the universe, and that we might even someday evolve into wondrous beings that we now cannot even imagine.

As the years went by, Daddy and I were thrilled to read articles quoting young adults who said that they’d been so inspired by Star Trek that they’d chosen their careers accordingly: each said that he or she wanted to be the one to invent the tricorder or the transporter or the holodeck (once Next Gen came along); and Daddy and I patted each other on the back for our much earlier insight. We began to speculate that Star Trek, by its very presence in our culture, might even cause itself to become true in many of its technological aspects, precisely because individuals were now striving to achieve in reality the very things that Trek had envisioned; Star Trek was thus destined to create a future at least partially in its own image.

However, much more recently, I’ve encountered websites that purport to discuss what Star Trek’s true inspiration is. The knowing smile rapidly fades from my face as I read the various comments typically listed. More often than not, the gist of others’ viewpoints is merely that Star Trek promotes racial harmony. My first reaction is that they missed the point. Is that all that they got out of it??? My second reaction is that they’ve cheapened Star Trek by reducing it to mere tired old liberal propaganda. Is self-imposed racial guilt the only thing that some people ever think to consider??? But in my third reaction, I figured out what it is that is really bothering me about this: those people are claiming a message from Star Trek that is simply not there!

Oh certainly, the various human races and nationalities on Star Trek embrace each other as equals, and work together in perfect harmony. But that is merely because we seem to have found all new groups of people to hate! Sure, there are no rude crude Earthly racial epithets and slurs…because we’ve gone out and created a whole plethora of new ones! Or can one genuinely think that it is okay to call Vulcans “pointy-eared hobgoblins,” or to refer to Klingons as “turtleheads,” or to denigrate Cardassians as “spoonheads” or “Cardies?” Is that really the manner in which we plan to greet genuine aliens, whatever they turn out to be like, when we do finally meet them??? Does the only avenue by which we can achieve racial harmony on Earth lie in finding someone else to hate?? Must we really perform a transfer from one set of hatreds to another?

I suggest that open-mindedness toward whatever their appearance happens to be should be a human goal right along with inventing the warp drive needed to get us there. And I further submit that patting ourselves on the back for how we treat fellow humans on Star Trek is irrelevant, as long as we continue to envision racial disharmony toward species that we haven’t even met yet.

In short, let us praise and admire Star Trek for the inspiration that it truly gives, but let us not attribute to it a message that simply is not valid.