Aside from “Star Trek (Birth)Day” every Sept. 8, our favorite stellar storytelling playground’s other main holiday is of course today — April 5, the day from 2063 that every schoolchild knows as First Contact Day!
Sitting here in 2019 it’s fun for me to direct newer fans to my interview a couple years back (below) with Noelle Hannibal, the “first [official] Vulcan woman on Earth” as seen in First Contact… fresh from Bozeman, via Angeles Crest, and humanity’s first extraterrestrial meeting in Star Trek, with the Vulcans.
But as much as we cheerily say “Happy First Contact Day!” to ourselves online or in passing … it strikes me just now how entirely appropriate and right it is that that event, and that phrase, is how Star Trek presents itself to the outside, mundane world each year.
What else says more about “the Gene Thing” of respect, diversity, and positive futurism … than celebrating the ultimate mixing of cultures— alien ones?! What else does 2019 need to hear more and more of than “Happy First Contact Day”? (And “Second”? And “Third”? And…)
It’s such a perfect antidote to the ugly xenophobia and isolationist fearmongering of creating “The Other,” en route to easier manipulation of divided masses, and true cultural stagnation. Such a simple phrase … such a subversively powerful subtext.
Just like the little show that it came from.
Happy First Contact Day, y’all!
