Since our cable company added BBC America to our television lineup, I've been binging on Star Trek Voyager. Mondays and Thursdays are marathon days, and I come home from work and while knitting or catching up on email or messages, I watch several episodes back-to-back. I've seen most of the episodes before, but every now and then I catch one with which I'm not familiar.
One of my favorites is a seventh season episode called "Shattered." In it, Voyager is hit with a bolt of space lightning that somehow fractures the ship into numerous time frames. The bridge, cargo bay, and engineering are in various time periods from the past. The dining hall and astrometrics are in the future. Very little of the ship is in the present.
Consequently, Voyager is stuck in space like a tractor trailer in a mud bank. It can't move and much of the crew only has information from their respective times. It takes a lot to convince people what they're experiencing isn't necessarily the same events their comrades are experiencing one deck below. They're suspicious and combative until understanding begins to set in.
Our country is very much in a similar place. It's as if we too were struck with some bolt of light that shattered us into different segments. Some are stuck in past events that can't be changed. Some are trying to forge a future with no clue of the history behind them (thus repeating mistakes.) According to a media that keeps on dividing, we're divided by gender, faith, race, ideology, political parties, class and subsets within each, and too many are combative and suspicious to hear others out.
This is one episode in this nation's history I wish was over. I know we can't solve all these problems, but we won't solve any of them until people stop viewing events and people through the lens of their own ideology and personal perspectives, and start addressing problems with reason instead of emotion.
And until we start teaching our children the history of this nation in its proper context. At one point in the show, Janeway looks around at all the destruction that will occur in the future and says she can't make the same mistake again, that she needs to avoid it. One wonders if those who risked their lives in throwing off British rule all those years ago would say the same if they'd had the opportunity to sneak a peak into modern day America. But the captain's first officer reminds her she's just seeing a glimpse of a few events, that a lot of good has happened during the years they traveled through the Delta Quadrant.
We've had a lot of good in this county as well. If we don't teach our people its proper history and remind them of that good, we'll remain shattered until something breaks.