Let’s talk about Star Trek!

I don’t mean the movies with the increasingly amazing technical effects. I mean the original TV show with the hokey lurching back and forth when your ship is hit by a photon torpedo. It was great!

Do you know?… The entire crew had devices that would allow them to talk with each other without wires! Can you believe it? We didn’t. We thought it was sci fi. But these “communicators looked like flip phones and you had to speak into them. I mean, there was no texting!

“Sorry. Can’t be beamed up at the moment, Ensign Chekhov… leave a voice message after the beep!”

What made Star Trek great is that (actually) communism won! I was so happy. The world finally got over its economic and racial, and gender disparities and problems. And if you look closely, you will see that absolutely no one on the Enterprise was trying to sell you anything. (Whereas in the “Alien” movies, capitalism is triumphant in all its depraved dystopia.)

Prove me wrong.

Of course, being interplanetary, the Federation (that’s a One-World Deep-State Government to all you Q aficionados) had to deal with “aliens.” Sometimes they were mean and dangerous, and sometimes they were mean and dangerous because they were misunderstood. And, always, thanks to the efforts of the “fearless crew” the Minnow (I digress) was not lost.

But of all the Star Treks I watched, the one that I loved best was “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” the fifteenth episode of the the third season from January 10, 1969. In case you forget the plot, the mission of this episode was for the Enterprise was to decontaminate the polluted atmosphere of the planet Ariannus. (Don’t you wish the Enterprise was around now to help us?) Just as they begin doing it, the story abruptly changes. (Don’t you hate it when that happens?)

Suddenly, a shuttlecraft approaches and docks with the Enterprise. Its pilot is Lokai, a political refugee from another planet, Cheron. The thing is, Lokai is pitch black on one side, and chalk white on the other. “Hmmm,” said Mr. Spock. Not long after that, another spacecraft approaches and it is piloted by Bele, who is looking for traitors. The thing is Bele is also half black and half white. “Hmmm,” said Mr. Spock. The thing is… These two hitchhikers hate each other with a deep passion!

And then?? Plot, plot, plot, plot, plot, popcorn, popcorn, popcorn. What is going to happen???

…

Not to shift gears here, but what I really want to talk about is Tolerance. You see, this one Star Trek episode is a metaphor for Ireland and the Levant and the United States. How so? you ask. Well, each side hates each other so much that they cannot see what they have in common. I am more shocked than anyone that it was the Irish who first figured out how to deal with it. And they did it with the Good Friday Agreement of 1999. Since then, no Irish person is shooting or blowing up another Irish person. Instead they’re spending their time being Irish. (“Well, you can’t have everything,” he said saying because he’s part Irish.)

However, they haven’t figured this out in the Levant. And so Israeli kills Palestinian, and Muslim kills Jew. And so on and so on and vice versa. But they all live in the same general area. They have much more in common culturally with each other than they ever will have with Hamas and Iran or AIPAC and Netanyahu.

And then there is us.. I can’t begin to tell you the utter contempt I have for Donald Trump. And for the people who support him: I think they are all insane, stupid, or perhaps stupidly insane. But to be honest, from their perspective, they’d have think the same about me. (But if they don’t know I’m a red, then it’s even worse than they think! Ha ha,)

The point is I’ve lost several Facebook friends over politics before. Usually because I was left or liberal, or because I was TOO left or liberal, and even a couple of times because I was not left or liberal enough. None of that can be undone. But at least I still have some rightwing and/or conservative friends. None of them are two dimensional. I always pay attention to their posts, especially the ones that are not political. And I am enriched when I do. They may talk about baseball (who doesn’t like baseball? although we don’t have to agree on the team), or their personal goings-on, maybe improving their house, or exploring, hunting or fishing, perhaps music, art, or dance, or their fondness for a drink (yay!) or for food. Always interesting, and often there will be many things we have in common. None of this would happen if we let our differing political opinions deprivee us of tolerance.

End digression.

So what been happening on the Starship Enterprise during this political excursion?? Well, let me tell you…

The twist is… Lokai and Bele are half black and half white but NOT on the same side! Who could have seen THAT coming?? “Hmmm,” said Mr. Spock. But then we find out that Lokai and Bele are the only two left of their entire civilization! Everyone else has been annihilated in a destructive civil war. You would think that would give both of them some pause. You would think that as two “males” and not two hermaphrodites the only course left for them and their soon to be totally extinct civilization is to live out their own lives in peace and happiness, maybe kick back with some cocktails, then take up a hobby or two, or maybe make money on the lecture circuit (not too much though, the Federation is as we said economically communist) for an enriching existence?

But no… This is not a happy Star Trek. This is a sad, sad Star Trek. So each of them beam down to the planet (at least that’s still futuristic sci fi, Sergey Brin and Tim Apple!) to fight each other to the death.

The End.

The Moral Is: Be Committed… But Don’t Be Confined.