Personally I love Star Trek. Now I know what you are thinking:
Did I just fall for click bait? But please hear me out!
I love the idea of Star Trek because it depicts a future where mankind has put aside its differences and is working on a common goal as humans. Unfortunately, we are far from this goal.
Every culture is guilty of hate and genocide
When you look at history you realize that every culture is guilty of hate and death. Modern day Israel is at a stalemate because two groups of people have been hating each other for centuries (Jews and Muslims) (Meri, 2002).
Travel to the East and you will learn about how the Mongols killed millions of Chinese during the reign of Gangis Kahn . Later modern day China invaded Tibet and forced the Dali Lama to flee, oppressing anyone who followed Buddhism (Chirot & Edwards , 2003).
During the invasion of China in WWII, Japanese soldiers killed around 300,000 civilians, and were guilty of forcing the surviving women into prostitution, leading the incident to be called “The Raping of Nanking” (Alexander, 2012).
During colonization, America killed over 2 million indigenous tribes while taking over the frontier (Tinker, 1993). At the same time, Australians were hunting aboriginal people for sport and killed an estimated 10,000 people, this number does not include the amount of Aboriginal tribes that died from first contact (200,000 before contact, 60,000 after contact) (Tatz, 2006).
When will it stop?
The above examples are a small spec of a giant mountain of narratives that pepper every cultures history. I could write a whole book if I included every country. But the point I wanted to make was:
No one is exempt, all of our ancestors are guilty
We can’t change the past, but we can change the future. As each generation passes we as humans are slowly becoming more tolerant of each other. But if we are ever to achieve the kind of future that is depicted in Star Trek, we have a long way to go.
Personally I don’t want to wait for our planet to be invaded by Aliens, before we get our shit together.
It’s sad to think that perhaps the possibility of life on other planets is more probable than human finding peace amongst themselves.
But I do hope for a brighter future for my kids and can only with that you do as well.
Have a great week!
Social Gelo with Angelo
Sifu Angelo Ferrer (M.S. Psychology)
2nd Degree Black Belt Instructor
Kajukenbo
References
Alexander, J. C., & Gao, R. (2012). Remembrance of Things Past: Cultural Trauma, the “Nanking Massacre” and Chinese Identity. The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology, 583-609.
Chirot, D., & Edwards, J. (2003). Making sense of the senseless: understanding genocide. Contexts, 2(2), 12-19.
Meri, J. W. (2002). The cult of saints among Muslims and Jews in medieval Syria. OUP Oxford.
Tatz, C. (2006). Confronting Australian Genocide". In Roger Maaka, Chris Andersen. The Indigenous Experience: Global Perspectives. Canadian Scholars Press.
Tinker, G. E. (1993). Missionary conquest: The gospel and Native American cultural genocide. Fortress Press.