Dear Editor:
Most of the TV and online viewing this Christmas season, was devoted to the theme of changing negative characters into positive ones: the sinister, selfish, and sullen Ebenezer Scrooge from the pen of Charles Dickens; the infamous Grinch from the imagination of Dr. Seuss; the nasty Imogene Herdman from Barbara Robinson’s story; The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, along with innumerable Santa Claus stories from any number of writers. All deal with the theme of a metamorphosis of a character due to the spirit of Christmas.
Enter William Shatner, the captain of the legendary Starship Enterprise. Last year, Shatner traveled to the very edge of space, courtesy of Elon Musk’s flying machine. If anyone would be a proponent of space travel given his background, and given the opportunity to actually experience space in real life, it would be him.
In an article written just around Christmas and shared over the internet, quite the opposite is strangely true. Not only was he disappointed, but he is also visibly shaken by the realization of the total futility, the darkness of the infinite and empty void in space, and the utter hopelessness of any sort of space exploration.
He came to understand the Star Trek episodes in which he starred were regrettably totally fake! He now sees our only hope for survival is this planet we all call home. He advocates strongly that we must now address what mankind has done to this oasis we call earth, and make corrections immediately. Famine, floods, forest fires, climate change, war, pollution, poverty, and disease; these are the issues that require our attention, not some make-believe fairy tale or pipe dream with no possibility of fulfillment even in any future generation’s lifetime!
NASA beams proudly today about sending a bunch of crash test dummies around the moon and back, remote controlling some sort of robot on Mars, seeing photographs never-before-seen of something or other they have to explain, and of course, rationalizes the purpose of a few space cowboys in the international space platform circling the Earth like some extra-terrestrial sort of merry-go-round! All for several trillions and trillions of dollars!
And for what purpose? Ironically, as Mr. Shatner has come to realize and now advocate, no human being will ever to able to “go where no man has gone before.”
Thank you, Mr. Shatner. Let’s all stop talking and start to do our part, (as the Christmas carol It Came Upon a Midnight Clear so eloquently says), correcting “two thousand years of wrong!”
Ron Johnson,
Mount Forest