It's going to be unique if I go forward with it. I mean, I am about as mellow as I've ever been in my life but I still feel passionately about things. Fewer things, but things that are at the core of me. For example, I am very strongly pro-life and I don't think that's ever going to change. I'm also very passionate about my faith, now more than ever. God is everything to me. I cannot be me without my love for Jesus the Messiah. Likewise, I'm a husband and a father and I can't be who I am without my desire to secure the future for my children. My life has been changed by all these things, my heart and my perception of everything is shaped by these life experiences, and strangely it has also been influenced by Star Trek, a show I simply followed for entertainment, a respite from the world.
I say strangely because Star Trek as a whole until 1991 was created by a humanistic atheist, Gene Roddenberry. He wrote TOS as "Wagon Train to the stars," a western where a ship replaced the wagons and planets replaced the arid western scenery. He wanted to articulate a future where humanity had survived and not wiped itself out with nuclear wars. Yet, with TNG, Roddenberry was convinced it would be his magnum opus, and he wanted to push it further to the ultimate direction, where humanity was no longer the 3 year-old child fighting over toys and chits. He wanted to paint his version of humanity having arrived at it's humanistic ideal, a utopian dream, nothing else and nothing less. Humans were still flawed, but the flaws were not born of selfish need and petty desires.
Why is that a problem for me? Well, as a parent, I know that there is something within every child that comes forward with needs and wants that will not be ignored. Needs, like food, warmth, attention, and dry diapers, and wants like toys, snacks, and activities that entertain, will drive that child to verbalize, point, crawl, grasp, but also drive them to scream, shove, and take without regard to others. We may teach them how to work with those desires and to keep their actions civil and kind, but that takes time and each child has their own response to the education, which is borne out over the course of that person's lifetime. The best turn out to be "good people." The worst are usually sitting in a prison for years or decades by the time they're done. My faith tells me that sin has corrupted mankind and the world around him. No one ever has ever perfectly adapted to those needs and lived a life free of defects. No one, that is, except Jesus Christ, Whose divinity and humanity were fully real, but completely under His control. The rest of us, we fall short, and that's the best definition of sin.
Gene wants us to, via the suspension of disbelief that is given to a show or theater production, accept that the childish needs that drive us all our lives, the ones that made Gene himself act so "worldly" as to have a 15 year affair with a mistress even while he had children with his second wife, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry. He was a man deeply flawed in some ways but in others knowing the truth of his own standards, grappling with his sins, and refusing to believe that his hunger for Eden was a lie. His caricature of God, never reflected better than when he wrote the character of Q in the pilot of TNG, was exactly what an atheist believes God to be, unsympathetic judge and petty rogue with nothing more than a chip on his shoulder to prove mankind is a "savage child race."
I find myself at once rooting for Roddenberry's vision and at the same time sadly SMH at the things he got fabulously wrong. Writers, which were used like tissues and toilet paper in the first two years of TNG, were constantly at odds with the idea that people in the 24th century didn't have the conflicts that they do today. If people didn't have conflicts over money, sex, and power, that eliminates nearly all the dramatic fodder for the writers contemporary with TNG. For someone who had enough drama in my life at the time, the ideas of Trek and TNG in particular sounded appealing. It was a way to see life as it could be if people merely lived up to the ideals they aspired to. For someone who didn't get "people" in general, it was really the ideal escape when all the other shows out there were just more of the same old stuff.
TNG was the final articulation of Roddenberry, a man who is on his own pedestal, having been granted his own sainthood in the minds of so many fans out there. The Great Bird of the Galaxy, as Gene had accepted the nickname, came home to roost. Was he going to lay an egg? What would emerge out of TNG? Like every birth and every creative process, the beginnings were awkward, messy and troubling at times, especially the first two seasons, but Trekkies kept the series alive long enough for the show to find its feet. It's survival gave us something unique and its legacy is one that kept the Trek franchise surviving into the 21st century and perhaps beyond. It's for that reason alone I should consider writing about it.
Also, a wise writer recently told me that before 40, a writer should write for others and that after 40, they should only write for themselves. While I have my doubts about that specific an age bracket, I do know that I need to articulate some of my world, because more and more of it is being swallowed up by the new one that I don't quite recognize. So we'll see how far I get. I hope to make a serious go of it. Who knows how far I can get?
No comments:
Post a Comment