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Showing Original Post only (View all)I'm a hard person to love these days and I'll tell you why [View all]
I was a teenage geek when Trek came on the air as a weekly series and it was stunning. Showing a hopeful and above all intelligent approach to life and civilization on and Earth that was assumed to be diverse, cooperative and peaceful. Chekov and Uhura and Kirk and the others and no one noticed sex or color or race or nationality as anything special or any impediment, Uhura was obviously as competent as anyone else, Chekov's impish nationalism cracked me up.
And above all there was Spock.
Nimoy-Spock managed to turn geeky into dignified and oddly cool, an amazing thing in our culture really, a role model I had a hard time pulling off. I was old enough to be sure it was make believe and young enough to be idealistic. Star Trek and the entire crew became a fairly big thing with me until the show was canceled. And of course I continued to think about the role model I'd found.
Fast forward forty years of steady upward climb to lower middle class for thirty of them and then in 2003 the wheels started coming off, prolonged bedridden illness, depression, vast bills, loss of job and the coup de grâce, my thirty year marriage fell apart and I was divorced reasonably amiably but horribly hurt in 2008.
I took my grandchildren to see the 2009 Star Trek reboot, all five of them. About halfway through the scene with Nimoy I realized I had tears trickling down my cheeks and it took me a little while to figure out why. Sitting there with my beloved descendants I didn't and don't believe we have a hopeful future ahead of us like the one in Star Trek, with a benign Federation and an open, egalitarian and post-capitalistic society. I realized that I think my grandchildren will probably not have the same opportunity I had to thrive in an open and relatively free society albeit a less than perfect one in many ways. I think the future is more likely to be Bladerunner or Clockwork Orange or Snow Crash or Rollerball or Elysium or any number of other dystopian films and novels I have experienced. I now think the power of human greed and hate is just too strong as I watch what is happening in this country and in so many places around the world.
I have lost hope.
From the stars our bodies largely come and to our star they will eventually go, we are all starstuff but some of us shine a little more brightly than others. Godspeed Leonard, our atoms will in due time be mixed and we will all indeed be as one.
You gave me hope and then, through no fault of your own showed me I thought it was gone.
I keep having to stop and dry my eyes to see the screen, I've been that way since I heard Leonard had left us.