Roddenberry and the Land of Great Expectations
Gene Roddenberry imagined a galaxy and time, in which people of all colors, races, walks of life, gender identities and career specialties worked together to:
“…explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before!”
All this, Roddenberry imagined for us, in the seventies. A female communications officer who was Black, one helmsman who was Scottish and another who was Japanese, a transporter chief who was Russian and a Vulcan Science Officer who had the ears of a devil!
What hope Roddenberry had for us. What faith that we’d continue our progress toward greater tolerance and acceptance. What a wonderful teacher he was, to give us the example of Star Trek to live by.
How we must disappoint his everlasting spirit……….
Maybe someday, we will be able to say, proudly, of ourselves “Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.” -Oscar Wilde.
I’m not even sure anymore, if we were ever any closer to living up to the blessed absence of bigotry portrayed on Star Trek, than we are Today. I was one year old in 1970, so I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to signs of bigotry around me. I’m pretty sure that I was only interested in doing baby things like drinking my milk, spitting it up, and sleeping.
Round about the 80s, I started to be aware that most of my Grandmother’s aids were exotic looking ladies (we call them Black and Brown, Today) and she called them her “girls”. That’s when I got the lecture about tolerance, and how to speak politely to Grandma’s aids, and in front of them.
I had already started to learn about the horrors of the Holocaust, as it related to my own people, the Jews. For about 8 years, it was hammered into me, that it was ignorance and bigotry that set off that powder keg of shame. ……for which the Germans are still making reparations.
I learned a very little bit about the true story of the European invasion of the Americas and how my own people massacred their way across this land, sometimes taking the time to kindly convert the First Peoples who were already living here, since they were “savages” with no gods of their own, and almost always stealing their children- the better to inculcate them, with God, from an impressionable age.
That little piece of American history has ever been “white-washed” in schools.
We all know how we enslaved Black people, to pick our cotton and raise our babies, before the Civil War. We apparently believed so deeply in the sanctity of justice, freedom and the pursuit of happiness for all Men, that we had to fight a war over whether or not Black people could be OWNED by rich White men.
After that, we had another fight over women’s rights, because we had learned so clearly from the Civil War the folly and injustice of oppression.
And it’s not like those types of slavery continue, today, after all.
Men don’t get to make decisions regarding a woman’s personal lives and health, like when they barred us from entering the workforce and thought nothing of harassing us, once we were there:
https://leanin.org/women-in-the-workplace
Black people aren’t slaves anymore:
https://returntonow.net/2016/06/13/prison-labor-is-the-new-american-slavery/
And our elders live in relative comfort, free from the fear of indentured servitude to a capitalistic system that puts profit before people and party before country:
https://www.thebillfold.com/2017/10/the-majority-of-americans-cant-afford-to-retire/
We’re all slaves to the system of capitalism that runs America. We’re all slaves to it, and we deserve better. ……….WE CAN DO BETTER, CALIFORNIA.
We can do better on our own, California. We don’t have to continue to support for profit prisons. We don’t have to continue to support for profit concentration camps for immigrants.
Once we have liberated ourselves from the US, we can start deporting American terrorists and denying Nation of California work permits to those who support crimes against humanity, with funds from their businesses.
We can seat our own supreme court judges, and be assured that they are people of integrity. We can disbar local judges who don’t uphold the law, or otherwise mistreat victims of crimes.
We can deport, fine or deny entry to those who would wantonly foul our environment and ecosystems. We can disallow drilling off our shores, fracking, and rampant over- industrialization.
In all of this, the best of us can work together, no matter our skin color, country of origin, or background, and truly embody what Roddenberry envisioned for us.
Roddenberry’s dream speaks to us, today, with as much relevance, wisdom and grace as that of Martin Luther King’s, when he gave his famous speech “I Have a Dream”.
Listen, California.