The Perils of Star Trek

I was chuckling to myself the other day about Star Trek. I'm far too ADHD to be a Trekkie. I think it would be hard for me to form addictive behaviors because I lose focus and move on to something else too quickly. Like, what was I talking about?

Oh, Star Trek. I used to watch the reruns in my late childhood and teenage years. And who did I identify with? Spock. That doesn't mean I'm Spock-like, just that he was my hero. He struggled on rare occasions to keep his human side under control, with its emotions (the hardest times were every seventh year in his mating season and on the off occasion when he was blasted by some strange variety of spore). I repeat, I am not a Trekkie.

I was chuckling because I think I formed a lot of values watching Star Trek--far more than my unsuspecting conservative parents might have imagined. Of course the conservative political lobbyist machine didn't really exist yet. I think Chuck Colson was still in prison :-) We still unknowingly celebrated Halloween and stuff.

But I've decided that the writers for Star Trek must have been steeped in the civil rights movement and all sorts of "liberal" late sixties causes. I remember this one episode where two almost identical men fought in a never ending battle in an all but destroyed planet simply because their faces had the reverse color scheme from one another. What was that all about?

Then there was another where a planet was so crowded that you couldn't not be touching two or three people at a time as you walked around. Only a very few ultra priviledged had a room where they could look out a glass and the shuffling crowds. Hmmm. What was that all about?

But I think Star Trek "jumped the shark" in the fourth movie when they beamed a humpback whale on to the enterprise, much to the surprise of the evil whalers chasing it.

Well, I learned a lot more than these things from Star Trek. It taught me how to think. Spock taught me that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one." Then Kirk taught me in the next movie that sometimes "the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the few." A naive primitive set Kirk to fighting a charlatan, with the sentiment that good always wins over evil. McCoy then taught me that in his experience, "Evil often triumphs over good unless good is very careful."

These were worthwhile lessons for a teenage mind. I think I'll go by the DVD's and see if I can get my son interested... ;-)