Little House on the Prairie and Star Trek The Next Generation

For about a week now, a bad cold has been working its way through my household. Starting with our second youngest son John and now firmly entrenched in myself and my wife and most of the other kiddos, this weekend has been a lot of laying low and trying to rest and take it easy. Yesterday, not feeling like doing much of anything else except intermittent napping and watching old favorites TV shows, I made a deal with my daughter Evelyn that we would alternate one episode of Little House on the Prairie for every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. What a study in contrasts that proved to be. On the one hand, Little House on the Prairie ran from 1974-1983 as a look backward to a picturesque pioneer family in the nineteenth century with a series based on the "Little House" series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The cover photo with Ma and Pa Ingalls plus their three young daughters smiling on their farm in the countryside says it all. This is a story centered on family settling down and building civilization in the wilderness, navigating the ups and downs of life guided by their love for the good Lord and one another. On the other hand, Gene Roddenberry's second Star Trek series ran from 1987-1994 as a look forward to a progressive future for secular humanism and scientism in the twenty-fourth century. And with the first Star Trek series (1966-1969) as a reference point, here is a new enterprise with a Enterprise in which the crew is always moving, always in a new place, always doing new things with new people. And this is a story about social constructs, and philosophy, and science, and technology, and interspecies diplomacy guided by social constructs and a Prime Directive based on man's Reason. Would it be overstating things to say that on the one hand we see a conservative understanding of where we are at based on the hard work and traditions of previous generations, and family, and going to church every Sunday, and building a community outward from our home? And on the other hand, we see a liberal understanding off where we are based on where we will presumably go in the future as man's Reason and Science evolve our capabilities and sensibilities past crude economic and political considerations like free market capitalism and republicanism into something more closely approximating purely secular technocratic socialism?  I for one don't think that would be overstating things at all.