1973 - when I started asking questions, like, "Why are we all dressed so funny?"

Saturday, November 14, 2015

STNG "The High Ground" or Trolling for Relativism?

I have such a love/hate relationship with Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry was clearly both a visionary and a secular humanist on the scale and order of say, John Dewey, which makes him (Roddenberry) an interesting "educator" who suffers not from Dewey's turgid prose.

Here's an episode that can't just decide between good and evil. Are we heading ever upwards to the sunny peaks of progress or will we be bedeviled by our propensity toward violence and self-destruction?

The terrorist leader pictured above -- in desperate need of the ministrations of the Flowbee -- gets his comeuppance from the agile Kerrie Keane who just says No his shenanigans. Meanwhile, Picard and Riker dither and kindly suggest less lethal means for dealing with this shaggy sociopath. Well done, Ms. Keane. You've done the galaxy a favor by going where the men would go neither boldly nor at all. Sometimes it takes a woman to do men's work.

Pope Francis had this to say about the Paris mayhem: "These things are hard to understand. There is no justification for such things. This is not human." Recognizing the inhumanity in a situation is a clarity of judgment that is need now as it will be in the 24th century.




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