I’ve written a few different entries in the past week or so that I ultimately didn’t put up. The content included:
-watching Chrissy Teigen’s “73 questions” video and feeling bad for/about myself
-two friends moving away and how that makes me sad
These are finished entries and who knows maybe I’ll put them up someday. I overanalyze and overanalyze things that I write, sometimes to the point of madness. And eventually, I either get to a point of damp satisfaction or I decide that it’s complete rubbish and delete it. So these works, along with so many others that I’ve created and abandoned, are sitting in some sort of digital purgatory.
So here I go, starting another entry; this time on something I’ve wanted to write about for a long time. Dun Dun Duuuuunnnnn. Star Trek. (raised hands emoji)
If you really want to get to the core of me, you’ll need to know that I think the basic problem with humanity is that we aren’t more like Starfleet. That is it, in one neat little intergalactic package. That is my politics.
I’m gonna nerd out about Star Trek now, so hopefully, you’ve seen it and love it as deeply and steadfastly as I do. If you haven’t seen it because you aren’t ‘into science fiction’ or something lame: stop. It’s so much bigger than that. Cue: *you don’t even know* in a muffled whisper. I love it, seriously. And I think if we lived in the world Gene Roddenberry imagined, we’d be better off.
Couple background things:
-I was in college by the time I’d seen my first Star Trek episode. Star Trek: TNG was (and still is) streaming on Netflix, and my favourite mister Todd introduced me
-I have never seen the original series, mainly because I think William Shatner is a giant douchebag
-If I could be any character I would probably be Guinan from TNG or Kes from Voyager
So Starfleet is an organization of spacefarers. They are governed by standards, aka the Prime Directive. Everyone on the ship is assigned a rank and a role depending on their field of study/interest (a purpose, if you will), and their ultimate goal is to “seek out new life and new civilizations”. TO BOLDLY GO WHERE…sorry, sorry. Reigning it in.
As a member of Starfleet, your entire existence is based on the quest for knowledge and awareness, to discover and encounter new things. Your background and appearance are irrelevant; what comes into focus instead is whether or not you can perform the job. Oh yeah, and there’s no money.
If you asked me to list the major problems that I think exist within our society, I would tell you I firmly believe that it’s all rooted in greed. Celebrity culture, consumerism, poverty…the list goes on. It’s all greed in some form.
We also measure our success by things while worshiping false idols (and I mean that in the most secular sense) and our worth by our appearance. It’s really discouraging to see when we could be using our time so differently.
I’m one of those dreamers who thinks that all of humanity could all band together and solve anything if it was so inclined. If we all worked together. If we put our energies into believing not that the world is terrible but that something greater is possible.
It’s that story about the people in hell or whatever trying to feed themselves with long sticks while the people in heaven are just feeding each other. We’re moving further away from one another. The world is so fast and scary. What can we do?
I don’t know, but it’s something I’ll continue to ponder.
That Lady Cat 