Beyond Our Shadows of Doubt

To say that I love the world of Star Trek is an understatement. I’ve seen every episode of every series at least fifty times. One of the things that I enjoy about the people in Star Trek is how they come up with a logical explanation for things that look like magic. “Captain, it appears that these aliens have the mental ability to tap into the energies of the Cochran plasma fields to construct a warp field that can generate enough of theta radiation through the Broussard collectors to propel the Enterprise six hundred seventy eight point four two light years over thirteen point seven seconds.” Okay, my Star Trek lingo sucks but I hope you get the idea. There’s very little in Star Trek that cannot be explained by Star Trek terminology.

In the Star Trek Voyager episode The Ties That Bind, Kess, the almost elf like woman from the Delta quadrant who joined the Voyager crew through their adventure as they do their best to try and get home, is critically injured on an away mission with Captain Janeway. Her body came into contact with an energy field in one of the temple’s of worship on the planet. Kess is beamed back to the ship for immediate medical care. The computer generated holographic Doctor uses all the technology and knowledge at his disposal to save Kess’ life but the injury is just beyond his ability to comprehend. Captain Janeway returns to the planet to talk to the inhabitants and their spiritual guides to find a cure.

Their cure was to kill Kess. The cure required Captain Janeway to take Kess’ dying body back to the temple so that the energy field could finish the job. Captain Janeway wanted an explanation why such a maneuver would work. They refused to give her one. The science that the Voyager crew was familiar with had proven itself inadequate so obviously there was no logical explanation worthy of the crew’s comprehension. The lack of a comprehensible explanation of the cure did not mean that the cure did not exist. It only meant that the cure was beyond understanding.

The standard practice of standard society is to dismiss anything that cannot be explained to the satisfaction of scientist. This type of thinking was used to great affect with the American tobacco industry which used the lack of an irrefutable scientific explanation for the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Even though the cause and affect of this link was more than enough evidence to justify the U.S. Surgeon General mandating a warning label on the side of each pack of cigarettes, the legal teams of the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel used smoke and mirrors to delay court judgments until the science could prove the link beyond the shadow of a doubt by even the most fervent cigarette industry supporter. Although people could no longer deny the science, there are certain benefits to denying the obvious.

Just take a peek at the brouhaha surrounding the science of global warming. Because all of the factors involved with this field of study are beyond our comprehension a lot of people are denying the cause and affect between pollution and global warming. Like the cigarette industry, big business polluters have a lot at steak in delaying doing anything about pollution of the planet. It’s nothing more than the cyclical patterns of natural global weather. So what if we every corner of the planet is experiencing once in a thousand year weather patterns practically at the same time. Killer tornadoes in February aren’t all that special. Disappearing glaciers tens of thousands of years old disappearing in a couple of years is nothing new to the planet. And the polluters have bought the finest scientist in the country to say there is nothing to worry about polar ice caps melting away. They also say there’s nothing to the theory that their view is tainted by the new enhanced size of their bank account as well.

The same logic goes into denying that racism is a factor in the economic disparity in the black community and the white community. A lot of people, both black and white and everything in between, take advantage of the insistence that the color of people’s skin is not a factor in employment, education, legal justice, wages, medical services, government representation, and the like. The fact that the black community happens to be on the shitty end of each and every yardstick used to measure social conditions.

Because we don’t have the technology or an acceptable way to measure people’s racist nature beyond a shadow of a doubt we can deny that racism is a factor in the plight of black people. It’s all just an illusion of black people’s imagination and insistence that the white mindset boogeyman or a group of white mindset conspirators are working behind the scenes to keep black people down. Forget your common sense. Forget any manifestations of cause and effect. In fact, according to the Supreme Court of the United States, the best way to defeat racism is to stop looking at it. A true head up the ass legal position if I ever heard one. If racism cannot be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt then we can dismiss it as nothing more than the disparity boogeyman just like the changing weather is from the global warming fairy or the lung cancer monster that used to hide under cigarette executive’s bed.