Christians Will Lead the Way to the End of the World

 The state of the world at large, but America specifically, saddens and disgusts me. I've been impressed with how much science fiction has engaged the world through some of these dark times. I remember back when Trump first made it into office. He started trying some of this bullshit back then, without the power of a conservative Supreme Court to back him up. I remember this one meme circulating back then, about how nerds were ready for him. Science fiction fans had decades of powerful literature behind them, only starting with the unfortunately accurate Handmaid's Tale. We also have 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, The Man in the High Castle, Clockwork Orange, and books aimed for younger audiences like The Hunger Games and The Giver. We have whole franchises that have strong elements of the downfalls of fascism and capitalism, with the Empire in Star Wars, with Dune, with Neuromancer and the entire family of punk genres that stemmed from that (cyberpunk, biopunk, steampunk, solar punk, manner punk, elfpunk). We know what totalitarian regimes look like. We know how to resist them, even if they've already won. 

A meme that's out there now has been talking about how technologically, we seem to be moving towards a Star Trek future, while socially and culturally, we're moving closer to a Dune future. I find this funny, because as boring as I feel like Gene Roddenberry was, I appreciate that he really wanted to inspire hope in the future. I've seen polls both on Facebook and Reddit asking people which universe they'd rather be a normal citizen in, ranging from Star Trek, to Star Wars and Dune and Neuromancer. The winner is always, overwhelmingly, Star Trek. Even from most die hard Star Wars fans, they realize they'd rather live in the Federation than under even the Republic in the Star Wars universe. This helps me validate my fandom of Star Trek even from such a young age. 

Which brings me to Star Trek. Ever since the reboot movies pioneered by JJ Abrams back in 2009 breathed life back into the franchise, the whole approach to the storylines in the Star Trek continuity hasn't been the same. I like the changes. Many older fans of Star Trek do not. They have come to talking about these shows as "NuTrek". They are typically critical of two things, the most, about these new shows. The first I can let stand, because it's a stylistic preference, though one I can still debate. Many older fans like the episodic nature of older shows better. From what I can tell, it's because they like to skip shows that had particularly bad writing, and they can still value the great episodes and not have missed anything too critical to the plot. This is a relic of everything going back to the status quo by the end of every episode. With the new styles, the shows are more serial, meaning that things happen in every episode that impact the overarching storyline. Which in turn means you can't skip that bad episodes and appreciate just the good ones. You have to take the good with the bad. 

The next criticism has to do with what people have dubbed the "SJW" elements. The "Social Justice Warrior" elements. This has to do with taking a stand and including more characters that are not just heterosexual or cis-gendered, meaning gendered what they were assigned at birth based on genitals. They find these stances to be too much an affront to their preferences for their fiction, too leftist. To this, I can only point out that Trek has ALWAYS been leftist. There was a reason why Roddenberry put a Russian and a Black woman on the bridge of the Enterprise. Because it was created during the Cold War and Russians were considered the bad guys, and black people weren't considered to be smart or leadership material. Uhura was both, an inspiration to so many young black girls all over the country. Unfortunately, they struggled with the resistance to this leftism when making both DS9 and Voyager, too. DS9 introduced Sisko as a Commander, instead of a Captain, because they weren't quite there yet. The episode about Benny the writer going mad coming up with the Space Opera that turned into Trek blew that whole bag of garbage wide open. As much as I thought she was crazy, Janeway got so much flack as a captain she would not have gotten because she was a woman. But they put her in that chair, anyway. 

This new generation of Trek is only the next step our society needs, acceptance of Queer heroes, of Queer friends. 

I had to remind someone on Facebook recently who was propagating the meme that our society is headed away from the utopian future Star Trek inspires. Even in the continuity of Star Trek, things for humanity have to get much, much worse before humanity finally matures as a people and gets better. In the Trek continuity, America collapses under a second Civil War, which snowballs into a whole Third World War, killing millions. In their efforts to rebuild, they make first contact with aliens, giving them both a reason to unify in the face of extraterrestrial threats as well as a mentoring culture in the Vulcans, a culture that actually listened to the Enlightenment principles they developed, instead of bowing them to Capitalist overlords like we did on Earth. 

We've known for decades that Trek had evolved past money. CAPITALISM IS DEAD in Trek. Democracy, equality, freedom, those were all things that survived, American values that made it hundreds of years into the future. But the delusion that Capitalism is how we get there disappeared. Life and love and liberty are all things Christians can agree are good, agree with Americans. 

What would it take to get there? Abolition of wealth. Single-payer healthcare insurance, universal basic income to help cover housing and food, universal education into adulthood. When people don't have to work because they need to, they do so because they want to. They apply themselves to things that matter, like artistic expression or scientific research, exploration, or service. Or not. Sometimes being happy as a spouse, a parent, a family member, is enough! 

Where are we? I'm ashamed to say that Americans who pretend to be Christians while having more in common with the pharisees that murdered Jesus have hijacked what was meant to be a secular nation. Oligarchs who want to force the poor to have children to make them get back to work, fascists that want to pretend the atrocities of the past didn't happen, aren't ashamed of them. 

I had a friend from Venezuela who was working here in the states for a summer. He seemed weirded out by the lack of walls and security forces here. In his country, when people have taken from the poor and not protected themselves adequately, the poor have fought back, killing those that would oppress them, and redistributed their wealth. Oftentimes, the charismatic demagogues that have risen up against the tyrants turn out to be tyrants themselves, starting the cycle all over again. But something struck me as an unfortunate aspect of the world. Real change often only comes from violent revolutions. The French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution. The ideals of the Enlightenment only got as far as they did because of the first two. The ideals of a post-capitalist world only got as far as it did because of the last three. The wealth disparity between the oligarchs of today and the poor is greater than it was before the French Revolution. It was easier to buy a house during the Great Depression than it is today. I can't help but be saddened by the realization that men like Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, are probably not going to die of old age. They have become subhuman, incapable of having enough compassion for their fellow humans to do right by them. I would not be surprised if someone finally decided to stop giving them the respect they refuse to give to others. It won't be me, but I can't imagine they can push much further before people rise up and take back their humanity. 

Even our best stories of the future say that things are going to get a lot worse before we finally grow up and do away with subhuman oligarchs.