(no subject)
Kirk is not surprised to get a cupcake shaped like a stovepipe hat with his coffee today. it is February 12, after all. And that's one of those days that means a lot to many people, being the birthday of both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin (literally on the same day in 1809).
To a lot of scientists from Earth and her former colonies, it's Darwin Day, a time for conferences on evolutionary biology and for recalling how far Earth has come from the ignorance and superstition of a world before The Origin of Species. Kirk has read that work, of course, and admires Darwin greatly for being perceptive enough to see the truth and brave enough to speak it.
But Lincoln is one of Kirk's heroes. He's read hundreds of books on the Great Emancipator, he's visited Gettysburg and Springfield, he's even met Lincoln (or rather a fairly authentic recreation of the man created by aliens). The things Lincoln did, in freeing the slaves and saving the Union, they set the course for the evolution of nations and even of man. And yet...
And yet, Jim keeps thinking about how a man of color in the times following the American Civil War was killed for the crime of kissing Katherine Barlow. Yes, it was long ago and such prejudices are no longer tolerated in Jim's day. But he sees the shattered Katherine in his mind's eye, and he wonders what lurks in humanity that could do such things, that could look backwards to times when men owned other men, to actions that were certainly not very evolved, to hatreds that were sheer nonsense and yet part of human thought for centuries.
Jim drinks his coffee, he looks at the cupcake, and he ponders a race that could produce a Darwin and an Lincoln and that could be so backwards at the same time.
[ooc: Offered by my inner history and science geeks in salute to Lincoln and Darwin on the bicentennial of their shared birthday.]
tiny tag: Cal Chandler
To a lot of scientists from Earth and her former colonies, it's Darwin Day, a time for conferences on evolutionary biology and for recalling how far Earth has come from the ignorance and superstition of a world before The Origin of Species. Kirk has read that work, of course, and admires Darwin greatly for being perceptive enough to see the truth and brave enough to speak it.
But Lincoln is one of Kirk's heroes. He's read hundreds of books on the Great Emancipator, he's visited Gettysburg and Springfield, he's even met Lincoln (or rather a fairly authentic recreation of the man created by aliens). The things Lincoln did, in freeing the slaves and saving the Union, they set the course for the evolution of nations and even of man. And yet...
And yet, Jim keeps thinking about how a man of color in the times following the American Civil War was killed for the crime of kissing Katherine Barlow. Yes, it was long ago and such prejudices are no longer tolerated in Jim's day. But he sees the shattered Katherine in his mind's eye, and he wonders what lurks in humanity that could do such things, that could look backwards to times when men owned other men, to actions that were certainly not very evolved, to hatreds that were sheer nonsense and yet part of human thought for centuries.
Jim drinks his coffee, he looks at the cupcake, and he ponders a race that could produce a Darwin and an Lincoln and that could be so backwards at the same time.
[ooc: Offered by my inner history and science geeks in salute to Lincoln and Darwin on the bicentennial of their shared birthday.]
tiny tag: Cal Chandler