Vol2 No3, Dec. 2010
The Parables of Star Trek By Kirok of L'Stok As any parent will tell you, raising children is one of the greatest challenges anyone can take on in their life!
They were negative examples as well. Sometimes logic was not the appropriate answer to a problem, sometimes you needed to listen to your heart. The Vulcan values of Logic and cool detachment come Its not just the physical care and feeding of the little blighters, into play more for strategic, long-term decisions however in your although just keeping them clean can be a battle in itself! No, I was day-to-day life you could do far worse than to consider the moral thinking in terms of the challenge of turning these small, pinky values of honour, respect and duty, old-fashioned terms and yet still purple, crying machines into mature, responsible adults who can so vital to society. fend for themselves and turn the world into a better place. The ideal of the honourable Klingon has taken on a life of its own, Easy, you say, I'll just imprint them with the values that I have! Ah! such that Klingon sayings, whilst thought of as clichéd by the Therein lies the challenge! What exactly are your values? bourgeoisie, can still be good advice none-the-less... I don't know about you, but until I had a child ask me one of the hard questions of life, like why people were so mean to their black, yellow or Muslim friend, I had never really put my own thoughts into any real order let alone formulated any real educational programme for my kids.
•meQtaHbogh qachDaq Suv qoH neH - Only fools fight in a burning building
You end up having to think on your feet, to be able to put something together at the drop of a hat and in the strangest places: in the car, the shopping centre, walking home from school. I found myself falling back, time and again, to Star Trek for examples that I could use to explain things in a way whereby we could discuss things on a level that we both understood.
Most of these come from Marc Okrand's book, The Klingon Way, which contains many that were obviously unacceptable to modern society...
Of course this only worked because they were both Voyager kids. They've made me proud of them many times but up there as one of the best was when my daughter, eighteen at the time, stood up at a workshop on women in SciFi at Conflux 3 and defended her hero Janeway - and then stood up at a Star Wars workshop to tell them what they were doing wrong! Yes! The House of L'Stok gained great honour that day! They never stood a chance! Star Trek is such fertile ground for examples of concepts. Some were the big and complex issues of political correctness - The Next Generation was the last word on that! That model of diplomacy, Picard, was the ultimate example of command and control whilst maintaining strength in negotiation. When we've been faced with what seems to be an insoluble black-or-white problem I've often used the Picard line, “Options! Give me options.” Interestingly, Spock used the concept first though in The Galileo Seven, when he said, “there are always alternatives.” When something we saw on the news needed explaining, out would trot some of the Trekie standards. Like IDIC, Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations: what better way to start the ball rolling on a conversation about multiculturalism? They were conversations too, I like to think that I learned as much from my children as they learned from me! Sometimes I would realise that I was just passing on to them the ways of my parent's generation. Not always a bad thing, I hasten to add, but in many ways no longer appropriate in the changed world that my children would have to face.
•batlHa' vangIu'taHvIS quv chavbe'lu' - One does not achieve honour while acting dishonourably.
•batlh pothl law` yIn pothl puS - Honour is more important than life •bortaS bIr jablu'DI' reH QaQqu' nay' - Revenge is a dish best served cold Few of them are truly original - they are all traditional sayings that have been 'translated' into Klingon. Perhaps more likely to be original are the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, since they were written for Deep Space Nine by Ira Steven Behr and Robert Hewitt Wolfe. The Rules of Acquisition however are definitely not politically correct on face value... •Once you have their money ... never give it back. •Greed is eternal. •There is no honour in poverty. They are still useful as negative examples, and the occasional rule has a basis in common sense, but by-and-large they are really just for laughs. Star Trek became such a cultural icon because it was more than just 'Space Opera' and it used known science fiction writers. It was written to make you think. It was made to stimulate discourse and even at times controversy, as it did with the first interracial kiss.
It was made to make you question the world around us through the lens of a show that was quite frankly fantasy! Barb Reader has pointed out that one of the great values of science fiction is that it allows us to debate the “big questions” precisely because it is divorced from reality. Everyone can use the Maquis as a metaphor for discussing the concepts of terrorism, political resistance and Star Trek contained races that were clever embodiments of different 'fighting for freedom', whereas using real life examples such as the philosophical or cultural extremes. The logical and pacifist Vulcans IRA or UDF will cause people to take sides. were balanced by the Klingons who were ruled by honour and the life of a warrior. They are icons of the dichotomy of the human Science fiction and particularly Star Trek is so much more than just spirit: Yin vs Yang. These were often brought up to illustrate the simplistic morality tales and action adventure, it is – or should be – necessity for logic or control in a situation or for drive, power and a fertile breeding ground for inquiring minds. emotion.
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