Letter to Star Trek

There was a time back in 1971 when I thought life wasn’t worth living. I was always warned of all the bad things going on in the world. (There’s too much crime, there’s too much hate, the racial discrimination, etc.) I was never told of the good things that were happening.

Unfortunately, I had a tendency to believe everything I heard. Until I found Star Trek, and after a few months of watching it, I began to realize that the world is not just a big bundle of hate. I saw all the love in Star Trek. They didn’t live in a world of prejudices, and I thought, well maybe, just maybe a lot of what I had heard was exaggerated…and I found out I was right. People can and do work and live well together, if they want to. 

I realized something else too. There is still a lot of crime and hate and racial discrimination in the world, and there will be until someone does something to change it. And it’s going to have to be the younger generations who make that change. Only we’re not going to if we give it all up. Star Trek showed me that. In a way, Star Trek kind of saved my life.

Trek fan Barbara Moss, in a letter to Gene Roddenberry, quoted in Susan Sackett’s 1977 book Letters to Star Trek.