As this blog entry is posted (8:31 pm), I’m nowhere near a computer - instead I’m sitting on the floor in the living room, watching an episode of Star Trek, “The Man Trap” playing from the “obsolete” technology of the LaserDisk. Hopefully, my daughter is sitting beside me, but my wife is probably shaking her head ruefully and busying herself in the kitchen.

Forty years ago right now, I was doing the same thing; the TV was black-and-white, Katie wasn’t around, and who knows what my wife was up to. But I remember sitting frog-legged on the family room floor, staring in wonder at that program. Oddly, my memory is that the first thing I saw was the beam-down…I suppose it’s possible we were a few minutes late getting the TV on, but I tend to discount that. I mean, I had been waiting for that day forever, saving up all the promo photos from the paper and the Sunday inserts. I was following the space program, and couldn’t wait to see “the future,” whatever the heck that turned out to be.

And I watched in awe.

Yeah, ok, that first episode was a little shaky, what with the green blood and salt-sucking monster. But there had never been anything remotely like it on television back then. It was simply awe-inspiring.

Tonight while I’m watching, I doubt there’s much of that awe left. I’ve seen the episode so many times I can recite most of the lines. And things have changed drastically from those days in the mid-sixties, when we thought everything was possible - heck, we are only now trying to recreate how those sixties engineers sent a rocket to the moon, when back then we all assumed we’d be in the middle of interstellar travel by the 21st century.

Wars, political embarrassments, and the “Me First” decade all seemed to get in the way of that Utopian future we built for ourselves. I remember attending the last New York convention held by “The Committee” (was that 1974? I’m too lazy to dig out the program booklet right now) and sitting in a coffee shop late into the evening with recently-met and long-forgotten “friends” discussing “the future.”

My present.

We haven’t come very far at all. We’re stuck in an unpopular war with no good way of winning, or even getting out. Political scandals are the order of the day. Too many children still go to bed hungry at night. Too many men and women are considered “inferior.”

I hope that if my daughter watches Star Trek with me tonight, maybe she can find a little touch of that awe in it somewhere. And maybe she can do a better job of turning that awe into reality than we did…let’s face it, we really screwed it up.