September 1, 2024

Bell Riot Day

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Today—Sept 1, 2024—is a special day for Star Trek nerds. Of which, you’ll be shocked to learn, I am one.

It’s Gabriel Bell Day. According to “Past Tense: Part 1 and 2,” a two-part episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, this is the day a riot in a twenty-block San Francisco holding pen for unfortunates—an open air prison called a “Sanctuary”—changed the course of human history. Empathy for these previously unmentionable members of society—guys who got laid off from jobs, people with no places to live—broke so many chains that this cataclysmic event led the way to interstellar travel and the Federation of Planets.

One of the things I love most about Star Trek is its unabashedly utopian vision: this is fully-automated intergalactic communism. And the most utopian element of this particular dystopic episode is that, faced with the evil it has created, mankind makes a collective decision to change. That seeing our own worst impulses in the mirror might change them is a wildly optimistic idea. That’s what makes Star Trek so electric; it simply assumes the best of all possible futures.

It’s perhaps no surprise that the Star Trek writer’s room of 1995 didn’t do all that good a job predicting what their future—our present—would look like 35 years hence. (Nineteen Eighty-Four, written in 1948, made a similar hash of its 36-year gap.) But gigantic, clunky computers aside, the writers did their best to hammer home the crisis of wealth inequality that led to a Very Special Episode about homelessness in the first place. (Of course, the episode is set in San Francisco, where, far from providing even token efforts at job placement, food, and housing for the homeless, the governor of California has purposely decided to break their tents and steal their shit: arguably an even more dystopian vision.)

Still, in the spectacle of these enlightened future spacemen—shocked and horrified that people who need medicine can’t get it, that the poor are trapped in their poverty—there’s a grasping at a kinder and less greedy future. And without the violent dismantling of greed, the show implies, the marginalization of the poor and disenfranchised might spell the downfall of human civilization. There’s even a feint at deconstructing respectability politics; our space station commander, disguised as a revolutionary, carefully handpicks the best spokespeople for the Sanctuary residents, “blameless” unemployed folks with clean records. And the federal government it imagines is both more surveillance-oriented and more expansive than our own. (One of the rioters’ conditions is to “bring back the Federal Employment Act”—sounds nice! Like maybe a WPA 2.0 kind of thing.) 

This is Star Trek, so the motley array of extras is hardly the Royal Shakespeare Company. But what haunts me about the episode is the final exchange, in which Sisko and Bashir are safely back to their gentler future. 

BASHIR: You know, Commander, having seen a little of the twenty-first century, there is one thing I don't understand. How could they have let things get so bad?

SISKO: That's a good question. I wish I had an answer.

(cue lingering look at the camera, followed by a shot of a spaceship nimbly arcing between stars)

That’s Star Trek all over. It’s gawky and geeky and earnest. But at its pulsing chroniton heart it really wants to know: can imagining a better future create one? 

I’d like to think so. Wouldn’t you?