By "us" I'm referring to us primitive folk that that weren't fortunate enough to live in the Trekkian future in which Picard was born.
Someone mentioned Picard's treatment of the 20th century humans in "The Neutral Zone" and it occured to me...
He doesn't want them aboard and considered them dead and unworthy of "Thawing." He then specifically asks for Worf to be present when Crusher revives them. He does this again with Samuel Clemens later in the series.
The Neutral Zone was the finale of season 1. Voyager's season one finale(even though they aired differently in the US) was "The 37's."
Contrast what Picard does above with this:
Picard: "Why couldn't you leave them frozen?"
Janeway: "I'm not just gonna leave them frozen."
Picard: "Make sure my Klingon Security man is present when you revive them."
Chakotay: "We should have only humans present when we revive them."
Are there many other other instances where Picard shows his disdain? Is this a reflection of certain writers? Or is is built into Picard's characterization. Riker too, perhaps. He often parrot's Picard's sensibilities on the "primitiveness" of past cultures or certain alien civilizations.
This is part of why I don't like these characters. They look down their noses at pretty much everything that isn't 24th-century Starfleet (or in Riker's case, some woman to flirt with or some weird food to shovel into his mouth).
The writing of this episode was rushed. It's a glaring a hole an archaeologist and humanist like Picard would not be amazed by this find and react with the appropriate sensitivity.
Archaeologists deal with physical objects, not people. Yes, studying
stuff can lead to insights into the history and culture of the people being studied, but it really doesn't say much about how to interact with them if you should happen to meet one.
If there had been any anthropologists on board, that's who Picard should have consulted. They're the ones who deal with
people.
I've wondered about Gillian Taylor. By the end of TVH she's got a ship to go to, presumably she gets to stay with the whales, and life will be peachy (and she never did give Kirk her "phone number"). But in reality, how hard would it have been for her to adjust? It couldn't possibly have been
that easy. Or maybe 23rd century people weren't quite as stuck-up?
Let's review that... how do you feel in general about people who lived in the 1600's?
Obviously, if you met one and he or she espoused ideas that were repugnant, you could condemn those, but in general that person would want the same things we want... food, clothing, happy family life, shelter, and a purpose in life. Within a few years, they could be caught up educationally, and would likely adapt quite nicely to some of the aspects of "modern life."
I would hope that none of us would choose to lecture them - a day or two after they were unfrozen - about the wrongness of their ENTIRE worldview.
And what if their entire worldview consisted of "this person is evil personified because he doesn't worship God/Jesus the same way I do, therefore the right thing to do would be to hang him/burn him at the stake, or <insert any other torture/execution method used during the time of the Tudors/Stuarts>"?
You can tell someone from that time that women are equal now, racism is wrong, literacy is a good thing for everyone, children are mandated by law to attend school instead of slaving in factories or fields or mines all day, slavery is outlawed in most of the world, some domestic animals have limited legal rights in some jurisdictions, same-sex marriage is legal in some countries, it's okay not to believe in God, and many other things we take for granted... but the proof of how successful you'd be in explaining all this would be which way the person jumps when they have their first real gut-level encounter with a situation dealing with something very different from his own time.
After all, there are 21st century North Americans who have trouble wrapping their minds around a lot of the things I just listed. Then consider the case of someone from an era in which women weren't even allowed to wear trousers and had no legal status as persons, no legal right to own property in their own names if they were married, and no legal right to say "no" to a man if he wanted sex with her, even if he were her husband (that's a recent development - the legal concept of marital rape).
I think nobody there was trying to be sympathetic to the tremendous culture shock that those people would go through upon waking up. Just because they could wake them up, does that mean they should?
Imagine someone from just 50 years ago waking up TODAY with smart phones and all of the technology we have come up with in just that short of a time span, what kind of shick and adjustment will they go through? Now even more when they suddenly wake up in the 24th century with not only more advanced technology but entirely different economy and way of thinking.
Hm. I'm 54, and I wake up on the average morning and wonder where the hell the last 30-40 years went sometimes. I don't tend to adopt new technology unless it's something I finally decide I need. I might continue to use it if I then find it useful or fun, but honestly, I wasn't remotely interested in computers until my old electric typewriter broke down and I couldn't find either replacement parts or a repairman willing to fix it. That was in 1990. I didn't go online for another 14 years after that.
I don't own a smart phone. My phone is a touch-tone landline that's attached to the wall. It doesn't have caller ID, there's no answering machine, although it does have last number redial. There's no list of phone numbers that enable me to call someone with the push of a button. It doesn't have a camera, it doesn't have games, it doesn't access the internet.
And yet I cope reasonably well in this century. At least I'll never wander into traffic because I'm wrapped up in some online game and not noticing where I'm walking.
Maybe the title of this thread should be "Is Picard a hypocrite?"
The answer to that is clearly "yes."
1217 A.D Apart from the basic needs of humanity, what values would someone from that world share with someone in 2017
1617 A.D - See above
If Enterprise's Picard unfroze three white Americans who were in stasis from the years 2016 and 2017. (I say white cos the ones in the TNG episode were White Americans). I wonder what he would think of them after reading the historical documents of the time?
If he were fair about it, he'd find out if they had anything to do with the events the documents reference before starting in on whatever pretentious speech he plans to deliver.
Love of family, love of God, good wine, dancing to music.
It would be like meeting anyone for the first time, you look for similarities, not differences. However, even if they spoke the english of their day, I doubt that modern english speakers would be able to communicate.
Except for a few words here and there, the English of the 13th century would be like a completely different language. There's a reason why Latin used to be the
lingua franca. Even 300 years later, Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon had to use Latin at first as neither spoke the other's language well enough to carry on a nuanced conversation.
By that time, however, Elizabethan-era English was close enough to ours that we don't have too much trouble understanding the poetry and plays of that time - at least as far as reading them. The pronunciation was quite different in some ways.
It's a good thing Picard had the universal translator - otherwise, 24th century English could sound very different from the English we're used to.
But it was the dead of someone who's heart stopped in a modern ER to a doctor in the 24th century.
I doubt that bulk of 17th century Humanity (who mostly were not white) would see themselves as second-class citizen in comparison.Depend on where they were from, if it was a cosmopolitan shipping/trading center of the 17th century, with peoples from dozens of cultures coming and going, our culture (less the technology) would look normal to them.
Women running around unchaperoned and wearing pants? The planned obsolescence of our modern economy? How about the lesser importance of religion in people's lives? Those wouldn't look normal.
That and 80s Dude on the bridge did add to the plot when responding about the Romulans. 
