Putting the Election in Perspective with Star Trek

It was a hell of a week, what with the surprise (at least to those in the thrall of media spin) election of Donald Trump. Twilight and I were, like many in America and around the world, sailing on rough emotional tides.

Not being drinkers, we sought solace in Star Trek. Still too frail for on Wednesday night the complexities of Next Generation, we chose an episode at random from the Netflix Original Series Vault.

The Episode we picked was The Immunity Syndrome, a classic tale in which Captain Kirk and crew run across a galaxy-eating space amoeba, which they naturally proceed to kill.  But not before the aforementioned entity has already destroyed several inhabited worlds and, just for good measure, a Federation Starship filled with Vulcans.

The episode put things into perspective.

Twilight and I are pretty serious Trek viewers, and part of our regular ritual involves tweeting our thoughts (the funnier ones, anyway) to @MissionLogPod, the twitter feed for John Champion and Ken Ray's long-running Mission Log Podcast. (Another part of the ritual is listening to that episode's podcast the following morning, usually over yoga. OK, Twilight does Yoga. Easily distracted and bored by yoga, I usually just stretch for five minutes before moving on to breakfast duties.)

However, this episode really got me thinking about the idea of perspective. Enough so that I felt compelled to skip yoga entirely (as if I needed an excuse) to email to Ken and John with my thoughts. Here's what I wrote:

Comment: Ken & John, hell of a week and Twilight and I (your two biggest fans - I'm sure other people make this claim, but if anyone tweets you more than we do you should consider a restraining order) have, naturally, turned to Trek for solace. Last night we decided to go old-school and picked TOS episode the immunity syndrome, which kind of put things in perspective for us. I mean, here we are worrying about the potential ramifications of a chaotic and potentially deranged individual suddenly being handed an insane amount of political power, which could, y'know, worst case scenario lead to the hastening of making the planet uninhabitable for humans and a fair swath of mammals for the span of a few millennium, and Trek present us with a gigantic space amoeba that, in addition to killing 400 Vulcans on starship has also wiped out a vaguely disclosed number of inhabited worlds. What did Kirk say...Billions of life forms? I forget (though I don't remember anyone mentioning the destroyed worlds again, though the 400 Vulcans seemed to get a fair swath of the "In Memorial" dialogue moving forward.)

It got me thinking...It's entirely likely that any, all maybe, of the worlds destroyed by the space Amoeba were going through what must have seemed to the inhabitants (the sentient ones, at least) as being terribly important, life-shaking even.

Perhaps a fair segment of the Quiznonians of Quiznar 8 were, at that very moment, agonizing over some monumental political issue...Quiznonian East Prime Minister Quaknar having just ascended to power, promising vengeance on the Quiznonian West beings, when *poof* - the space amoeba that had been coming their way all through the campaign finally arrives without warning.

Puts it into perspective, eh?

Or maybe that's just the stimulants talking.

In any event, keep up the good work.

Joshua Samuel Brown 

John and Ken always respond to our tweets. Still, I was surprised to get a beautiful response within the hour from John Champion. He wrote:

Hi Joshua - 

Great to hear from you. So the moral of the story is not to worry about our political situation because a giant space amoeba might just be on its way to swallow us up anyway? Heh heh - well, I know I’ll sleep better at night now ;-) 

I get what you’re saying - I think we do tend to focus on the immediate, and our anticipation of what *might* happen in our petty squabbles tends to blind us from the big picture. 

For those people who say “may you live in interesting times,” well, these are really interesting. I kind of wish things were less interesting right now. But I’m still somewhat hopeful. Don’t know why exactly, but the shock is passing (for now). Get back to me and see how I’m doing later, OK? 

Cheers - and thank you again for all the support/Tweets/comments. That means the world to us - 

John Champion
Mission Log: A Roddenberry Star Trek Podcast
www.missionlogpodcast.comTwitter: @missionlogpod

So...is there a moral to any of this outside of the need to seek solace in perspective? I'm not sure. But I do know that Thursday was a better day than Wednesday had been. And today isn't looking so bad either.  So thanks, Star Trek. And thanks, John and Ken.
If you haven't seen The Immunity Syndrome recently, go back and watch it. It's definitely on my top-ten Trek Episode list. And if you've gotten this far in the post, there's a good chance you may be a Star Trek fan.  If so, might I recommend Mission Log Podcast for meanings, morals and keeping things in perspective?