TRYING OUTSIDE THE LINES

I never so vividly realized how much I learn from others who are not like me as when I have been watching Star Trek. Perhaps it’s just the time that we’re living in that makes it so apparent, realizing not that much has changed since Gene Roddenberry lived. Or maybe I’ve fallen in love with characters who speak to each other in a beautiful language of curiosity and acceptance to find and connect with the value they each share from simply being.

I’m a little brown girl who grew up in the city. Sci-fi was nowhere on my radar until I met my fiancé (who happens to be a closet engineer and aspiring physicist – oh, and white). He felt me out with a couple of action-packed sci-fi movies, and a couple of the unserious ones. We started with Enterprise. My first question about halfway through the first season was, “Why did you let me get emotionally invested in these fictional people’s lives?” Now, two and a half years later through several different series and in the middle of The Next Generation, I’m starting to understand why.

Not every character is a person, a human person, rather. They come from different planets, speak different languages, look like someone dreamed them up. They have different customs, different beliefs, different perspectives on common situations. Ages vary, from teenagers to those who have watched the starts move through millennia.

And despite all of that, they work and live together respectfully, being considerate of each other, of each aspect of each other – customs, rituals, sacred spaces. Through this and the common daily experiences, meals, recreation, rest, they share life with each other. Maybe because they are in the outer regions of space and depend on each other to merely survive. But sharing life requires a few things – respect, patience, dignity, reciprocity, acceptance, humility, openness … It is recognizing that the life across from me is no more or less worthy of existence than I am, that that life has a story to be told and to be heard as well, that that life is also doing the best it knows how to do to make it through this moment, as am I, so why not go about it together.

In Time’s Arrow, Sam Clemens asks Counselor Troi, “I come from a time when men achieve power and wealth by standing on the backs of the poor, where prejudice and intolerance are commonplace and power is an end unto itself. And you’re telling me that isn’t how it is anymore?”

Watching the news, hell, stepping outside today makes me wonder if those gone before who gave so much of themselves so that I could take up space and have a voice without cost to myself or those I love are restlessly turning in their graves. And I hope it doesn’t take hundreds more years for the real world to catch up to where Star Trek was. It would truly be where no society has gone before, wouldn’t it?