Driving Diversity since 1972

Star Trek - The Original Series and the contemporary society

A lone star-ship travels across the dark space dotted with tiny sparks of fire. Over a piece of evocative music, an orotund voice modulated. “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

In September 1966, NBC broadcast Star Trek. It followed on Canada’s CTV network. It is perhaps one of the few series that got canceled in just three years, but posthumously rose to become a phenomenon. In 1972, Associated Press wondered, “Nothing fades faster than a canceled television series, they say. So how come Star Trek won’t go away?”

The answer may hide in the decades and events that happened years before Star Trek - The Original Series was aired. Gene Roddenberry’s close encounter with the law-and-order division could be one of the influences or an escape to escape from reality to the world of science fiction like Forbidden Planet. For the first half of the 1950s, he continued as a speechwriter for Los Angeles’ Chief of Police. But it seeded the tenants because of the socio-political events in the United States and the world.

Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, in his acceptance speech in the 1960 United States, used the term New Frontier. It was ambition. This young man’s voice carried a message unlike any.

?“We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of the 1960s, the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, the frontier of unfilled hopes and unfilled threats. ... The pioneers gave up their safety, their comfort, and sometimes their lives to build our new west. They were determined to make the new world strong and free - an example to the world. ... Some would say that those struggles are all over, that all the horizons have been explored, and that all the battles have been won. That there is no longer an American frontier. ... And we stand today on the edge of a new frontier, the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils. … Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus. ... I’m asking each of you to be pioneers towards that New Frontier.”

The echoes of this speech are clear in the voice-over opening credits, where humans were moving to the Final Frontier. The journey started with the New Frontier, with unknown threats, opportunities, and perils. Thus, Star Trek began exploring the unknown. Robert D. Marcus explained, “Kennedy entered office with ambitions to eradicate poverty and to raise America’s eyes to the stars through the space program.” Not surprisingly, TIROS-1, the first weather satellite, is launched by the U.S. shortly after. One month after Russian Astronaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel to space, the U.S. put Alan Shepard on the pages of history as the first American in space. It was just a few years before Soviet Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov would perform the first spacewalk. As a species, humans were achieving far greater success in reaching out to the stars. The stars offered hope for the future and humans balanced between the anguish of understanding the greatness they could achieve and the limitation of their own reality.

Only five years had passed since the recession, and unemployment in the U.S. was at its record high of 7%. A decade under President Nixon, the misery index was at an alarming 10%.

Realization of the follies, vanity, and wars was not lost. Yet, the aftermath, or ongoing differences, continued to derail the peace. Berlin wall was being put up to separate East and West Berlin, and the Vietnam War escalated. A couple of years back, in the Bay of Pigs, the United States unsuccessfully tried to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba as revenge and to pre-empt Cuba from making an alliance with the former USSR.

That was not all; less than four years ago, the two superpowers of the world, the United States and the USSR, with their nuclear warheads, almost started the third world war, which would have annihilated nearly 54% of the world population. The world had seen much of the carnage of the wars, and the possibility of such a war where there could be no winners was unnerving.?

Often, Star Trek reminds us of the bloodiest history of Earth. The dark ages, as some label it, were the age where the war to prove one’s supremacy or dominance nearly destroyed the planet. From the brink of extinction, the human race came together. Again, one could hear the words of JFK’s speech as the undertone.??

“My call is to the young in heart, regardless of age. ... Can we carry through in an age where we will witness not only new breakthroughs in weapons of destruction but also a race for mastery of the sky and the rain, the ocean and the tides, the far side of space, and the inside of men’s minds? ... All mankind waits upon our decision. A whole world waits to see what we shall do. And we cannot fail that trust, and we cannot fail to try.”

Star trek did boldly go where no television series had ventured before. This was the era when African-American student James Meredith got to enroll at the University of Mississippi, and Sidney Poitier became the first so-called “black actor” to win the Academy Award for “Best Actor.” More than a hundred and fifty years had passed. Still, equality was a distant dream in the U.S. Johnson had begun his “Great Society.” The vision that Johnson saw was a total elimination of poverty and racial injustice. So it was when Martin Luther King, Junior, the US Civil Rights Leader, urged the country to “rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.” He knew the time was upon to act. He said, “Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.” His dream was social justice, and freedom to be bonded while retaining the diverse fabric of the nation. His dreams were partially fulfilled in 1964 when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. However, it would take over four decades when corporates would include Diversity and Inclusion as one of their guiding principles.

During this time, the Star Trek Original series shocked the world with its diverse cast. Roddenberry’s believed in IDIC, or “infinite diversity in infinite combinations,” brought Hikaru Sulu with Japanese origin; Pavel Chekov was born to Russian parents, and Montgomery “Scotty” Scott hailed from Scotland. The laudable casting was of Nyota Uhura, a communications officer specializing in linguistics, cryptography, and philology was the first female Black character shown in a non-menial role. Remember, NASA had a policy (at that time) to exclude women and people of color from the Human Space program of the United States. It created a flutter, especially in African American children. Whoopi Goldberg reportedly jumped with joy and told her mother, “Mama, there’s a black woman on television, and she ain’t no maid!”. The community viewed it as a hope for the future, when racial discrimination would be a thing of the past. Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura, was planning to leave the show, met a fan at an NAACP fund-raiser. This person was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who not only confessed that Star Trek was the only show that he, and his wife Coretta, would allow their three little children to stay up and watch; he insisted Nichelle does not quit the show, for she was a part of history. She cannot leave. When she related the incident to Roddenberry, what the King had said, he cried.

Legends and stalwarts of the time appreciated his vision of a cohesive and harmonious existence. Of the main cast of seven, only two, Leonard McCoy and James T. Kirk, were American. It was just not a subtext; it was a statement that forged the concept that sentient beings like humans can transcend the petty boundaries of countries or planets in the minds of young audiences, especially children. One could only hope that we have more humanitarians in film and television who could inspire generations, especially in developing countries gripped with violence, intolerance, inequality, and poverty.?

Dreaming of the twenty-third century was only complete if it solved poverty. New age was emerging out of poverty. The inspiration could have been the charismatic young President JFK’s promise of hope. He said he wanted to “get America moving again.” His plans were to reduce unemployment to below 4% with an economic growth of 4-6% annually. What could be a viable solution for poverty and greed? The answer was the use of replicators. ‘Food replicators’ were available to all. Food and water became accessible to all, and then it was the turn of medicine. It eliminated the need to win or claim territories for resources and money. The wars ended; peace prevailed. With that, the fundamental human nature to create harmony, seek joy in creativity, and be curious took center stage.

They introduced the computer coding language BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) in the decade when Star Trek dreamed of warp speed. That was the power of dreams that Star Trek inculcated.?

After 79 episodes, the channel canceled the series. The reviews were mixed, but slowly the message of the utopia; a society where individuals strive selflessly to better the society, gained popularity. Letter campaigns and fanfictions of Trekkies and Trekkers started. Then came along with re-runs in syndication. This time society had matured a bit more, and Star trek became a sensation. In times of hope and despair, Star Trek symbolized hope. It was a benchmark of what humans can achieve when we break the shackles of petty differences and intolerance.

The elevation of Star Trek to become a cultural phenomenon shows the basic nature of humans, which as Occam’s razor would dissect to reveal, is that, even in the worse of situations, in the darkest hours of despair, we keep a small fire of hope burning in our heart to rise above the needs and petty difference and to achieve something greater than ourselves.

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