Beauty Dish: True Underground Adventures of an Avon Lady — not, one might think, the sort of blog I would be likely to recommend. Yet this page of her blog contains several heartwarming stories of how Star Trek infiltrated, then illuminated her life and the lives of her two young sons. I challenge most of you to read all of them without tearing up or at least going “Awwwww.”
My favorite involves the words her eight-year-old was suspended for saying in school instead of the patriotically correct ones:
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Federation of Planets, and to the galaxy for which it stands, one universe, under everybody, with liberty and justice for all species.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in a world where that was what kids pledged themselves to, instead of to a corporate-theocratic empire determined to conquer the planet while pretending to be a democratic republic?
You’re right Isaac, the story about the pledge is great. Reading it brought back to me just how important Star Trek was to my spiritual reeducation. I quit the born-again church my family attended when I was fourteen because the elders had told my mother to make me get a haircut. It was touching the tops of my ears on the sides. Scandalous!
I began studying comparative religion on my own after that and made a new friend who turned me on to Star Trek. One of my favorites was the story of the planet Gideon, where disease had been conquered, birth control was forbidden, and the people wallowed in the miseries of overpopulation. This episode was a revelation and it did much to expose the veil of religious tyranny that had surrounded my life as I’d grown. I continued studying the world’s various organized religions and their histories, becoming intrigued by the references to animists and the simplicity and purity I saw in their vision of life. At the end of three years, at the age of seventeen, after concluding that most if not all the major belief systems I’d examined missed the point; I came to this happy realization:
“Well, I’ll be damned! I’m a witch!â€
Star Trek wasn’t totally responsible for setting me on the path my life has followed since, but it was certainly influential.