The Enterprise is the name of the starship in Star Trek. That my students were ignorant of this bit of trivia didn’t surprise me, but that they’d never heard of Star Trek? Not the original series? Not the 11 spin-off series? Not the first six movies? Not all the others that followed? Twelve television series and 13 movies to date. Plus, comics, novels, and video games. I was surprised myself when I learned of the proliferation. But to have felt no breath of all this? I was astonished. It may have blown over me with hardly a whisper, but it had swept down entirely different avenues than the ones my students frequented, stirring not a leaf in their world.
In a lesson on talking about the future from different points in the past, the English textbook for my advanced class of high schoolers featured interviews with Star Trek’s creators about the show’s influence on a generation of inventors. As a warmup, I played the class a four-minute video clip from the pilot episode. In the first minute, the Enterprise receives a distress call from a ship, and the captain, Christopher Pike, must decide whether to ignore it or act on it. Quickly the crew determines that it could be a signal emitted by a starship that disappeared 18 years before, a signal that is only now arriving across time and space. What to do? The captain doesn’t blink. He looks at no one, consults no one, shows no doubt. Without some indication of survivors, he cannot risk the crew’s own quest to investigate the call. He gives his order: “Maintain present course.”
One of the crew gives a start. You can imagine him thinking, dismayed, So that is the plan, ignore the signal? Others exchange meaningful looks.
Well, good, I thought. Two centuries into the future, and some people are still human. I paused the video.
“What would you do?” I asked one of the three students.
“The same as the captain.”
I asked why, and he said it might be a waste of time as well as expensive to change course to investigate.
“There might be survivors,” I reminded him.
The student shrugged.
“What do you think?” I asked the next student. He agreed with his classmate, and so did the third student, for the same reasons.
I might have agreed too, I told the students, but I had just seen a news story that made me hesitate. I told them about two Senegalese immigrants in La Coruña who, in July 2021, had intervened when they saw a group of men beating up a lone man. The two Senegalese men had tried to get the victim to safety, but the crowd followed and surrounded them. One of the Senegalese had covered the injured man with his body to shield him while the other had tried to fight off the attackers. The police arrived, and the two Senegalese men, whose legal situation was irregular, melted away into the crowd to avoid trouble. They were the only witnesses to the attack who had tried to help the victim.
Their testimony was necessary in the investigation, however, so they were found. They were not penalized for their illegal immigration status, as they had feared, but were lauded as heroes. In the snippet of the interview I watched online, one of the men explained that they hadn’t hesitated to help the victim because they had been taught to do the right thing. You would do the same for anyone, he said, without question. You did not first calculate the cost. You did what was right.
“Shouldn’t the captain,” I asked, “like each of the immigrants, put helping another above concern for his own safety?”
A student answered that the captain had to think of the crew as well as himself. He was responsible for their lives.
We all agreed that the captain’s position as the crew’s guardian needed to be included in the reckoning. Meaning that again, acting to help would be a calculation, not the reflex that it was for the two Senegalese men, who faced a violent crowd without thought for their own immediate safety or future.
A student asked what happened to the victim, and I said that he had died from the beating. What happened to the two immigrants? They were given temporary residence and work permits. Heroes, they were called. “We’re not heroes,” they repeated to the media. “We were just trying to do the right thing.” They reaffirmed their beliefs this past winter upon being made honorary citizens of the city: “When someone needs your help, you have to stand up.”
“It worked out for them,” a student commented.
But did it? I hope it did, and yet I also hope their heroic act made no difference in their ultimate well-being, and that their lives, threaded through by compassion and courage, are no better or worse than anyone else’s. Keep the reckoning at a minimum. Don’t even think about consequences. Just do the right thing because it’s right and for no other, more compelling reason. No rewards or punishments in the equation. That’s how it should be. Reading the news reports on the incident was not a discovery, perhaps, but a rediscovery.
