Papa Gene Blues

Happy Birthday Gene Roddenberry!
I wish you were still here. I am sad to think that your vision may have died with you.

There is so much that the world has now that can be directly and indirectly attributed to his vision of a future that almost all of us wants. All of us except the people who are trying to bankrupt the entire planet and not just America, that is. And who knows. Maybe the only way to get to his future is through some kind of socio-economic calamity that no one could possibly foresee. His world needed a third world war and genetic holocaust to teach us how valuable we each are and thus give way to that nifty Next Gen world that I want to live in. So maybe the economic KABOOM! is better. Hey... at least I am thinking positively for once.

It isn't the nifty gadgets aboard ship or the fact that food replicators allow coffee to be served on any deck any given time of day. And it isn't even the fact that it only takes a few hours at Warp speed to get any where of interest outside of the Van Allen Belt. It is the concept that we have zero borders on Earth. Terra Firma belongs to all of us and whatever interests we have are easily shared. It is the idea that we care about preserving every one's traditions in the private sector. Paris will always be Paris. Which means EMI can suck it and in Roddenberry's world I can have whatever music I want when ever I want it. I think that a bunch of copyright attorney's just had mini strokes. :D But I digress....

In Roddenberry's future we get to go out and see what is there is an instead of colonizing without thought to others and under the assumption that the Terran Way is the only way. Other  cultures are preserved. They are added to our own. We expand ourselves and we all grow together.

Facile? Impossible? Naive? Maybe. But it is something that we can strive for and one man gave us a blueprint of our species better than we have been. Even today we assume there is only one way to do a thing... the American Way. Or the capitalist way. And that makes everyone else with ideas a little pissy. We don't quite have the vision anymore. In the 60s we were united on the thought that there was something to reach for beyond the atmosphere. Today we have a fractured vision. And I won't even waste our time degrading idiot political biases that doomed our space program. I'll just say we need to renew our vision. To remember the future that we have yet to achieve and go for it.

And there is no better day to think on such things than Papa Gene's birthday.