Catch-uppance: Saturday

This has nothing to do with anything that happened Saturday, except for the fact that nothing much has changed since then. I've been watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on Netflix for the past couple months. It's a unique chapter in the series' history. Rather than exploring the galaxy, the crew mans a space station in a volatile area of space, positioned at the mouth of a wormhole that leads to the other side of the galaxy. Without going into too much detail, their situation allows for a lot more character development than the other, more traditional, exploration based series. DS9 is still subject to a lot of the weaknesses of the Star Trek franchise, but a lot of people consider it the best.

I just watched a two-part episode from season three called Past Tense. It's a pretty standard time travel, causality/morality tale, but this one strikes a little closer to home. Three of the main characters are accidentally transported centuries back in time to 2024, just a few days before a riot breaks out in a San Francisco sanctuary district that changes the course of American history forever. Poor, homeless, unemployed, and mentally ill people are forced to stay in sanctuary districts walled off from the rest of a city "for their own good." Of course this also serves to keep them out of sight of polite, employed society.

Sisko and Bashir find themselves thrown into one of these Sanctuaries, put into a line for job placement that is long and slow (some say imaginary) because of a troubled economy. In a time when congress discards the lessons of the past century and decides it's job isn't to create employment opportunities by investing in infrastructure, but to give more money to the "private sector" to "create jobs" by slowly dismantling the social safety net that has helped millions of people (albeit not enough), it's not hard to imagine this happening in thirteen years. These concentration camps for the unemployed were only closed after the riot ended with the needless death of a leader who was shot protecting the hostages from harm. The sob story got around and slowly changed the thinking on how to deal with the poor.

I'd like to hope it wouldn't come to that, but when government leadership reneges on a temporary compromise on a minor tax cut bill just to prove a point, it's hard to believe much of anything can get done around here.