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Amy and I are watching documentaries. We just finished Trekkies. Scary. What makes it so frightening is how close I came to being there, on the convention floor, dressed in a Federation uniform and plastic ears. So...very...close. I dated a girl in high school who had sewn her own uniform (medical blue, because she wanted to be a doctor) and I almost ordered a communicator and some rank pins...if you know what I mean by this, you're pretty geeky yourself. But I was always just a bit outside that level of commitment. I watched Star Trek Watching a movie about people who dress in the uniforms of a fictional space agency, who drive cars altered to look like spaceships, who gaze in the general direction of the homes of Star Trek actors (they're actors! just actors!) and who know more about Klingon/Human relations than about their neighbours...I think, "There but for the grace of God go I." For some people, Star Trek is an escape, a place they can go where they're not judged, where they can know things and be important. It's sad that we've created a society from which people want to escape, in which a fantasy world is preferable to the real thing. It's sad that the ideal society which Star Trek describes, which we obviously have the ability to imagine, is so distant from our reality. We can't make starships and phasers and tricorders, but would it be so difficult to acknowledge one another's common humanity? |
, I even had a model 