Star Trek on Welfare

[Rush Limborg]

In "Past Tense, Part I and II", Sisko, Bashir, and Dax are thrown back into the year 2024. Sisko and Bashir end up in a govenment-run sanctuary for the homeless. It's run so badly that a riot breaks out.

Frankly, I've always wondered if the writers were condemning the welfare system. After all, the "sanctuary districts" are government-run, and Sisko's conversation with the clerk in the beginning seems to imply that the districts are based on the "we'll take care of everything" mentality that welfare is, quite frankly, based on.

It's even more interesting when Sisko says in Part II, "These people need to get work, not depend on handouts." He says the last word with a hint of disgust.

Hmm...were the DS9 writers experimenting with conservatism --or even, Libertarianism?

 

[sbk1234]

If so, gutsy move, and nice for a change. However, I always saw it more as the literal interpretation of just sweeping the whole homeless problem under the rug, in a sort-of Nazi-concentration camp type thing.

 

[MeanJoePhaser]

It was tyranny against the poor and disenfranchised. The basic idea was that people had to have ID and/or had to be somewhere. Sisko and Bashir were lacking identification and therefore subject to forced relocation.

That's not uncommon today. Some people aren't just concerned about the homeless as humans, they think people should be somewhere even if its against their will. You just can't be a free roaming person without an address.

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

I was wondering if perhaps whatever administration was in charge at the time actually abandoned the idea that those people who are capable of working ought to work for a living.

As for the perspective the 24th-century residents come from, however unrealistic I believe such a thing to be in a moneyless economic setting, it does seem people are expected to work for a living, that it's drilled into kids at a very early age that one must work in order to "better oneself." Interestingly, you get to see someone who doesn't do so well at this, in the person of Bashir's dad. You'll notice that as someone who can't hold a job, he's not very well regarded.

 

[Navaros]

No, they were not experimenting with conservatism.

The DS9 makers were not criticizing the poor and saying they should work. Rather, they were criticizing the current government in real-life that existed today at the time they made the show. Yes they were condemning the welfare system, but because it doesn't do enough to take care of and help the poor; not because they don't want it to exist.

The DVD extras have a few sound bites about this episode in which these things are made clear (although the I emphasize the word few, certainly not worth buying the DVDs solely for the little tiny bit of extras content). One of the DS9 makers comments on the DVD extras that at the time they made the episode, they picked up a newspaper and noticed that what they had written about in the episode had actually happened in real-life too (segregating the poor/homeless into their own boxed-in society).

 

[Rush Limborg]

Hey, here's an interesting note:

One of the cops who encounter Sisko and Bashir, says, "Give me your UHC card."

UHC.... Universal Health Care, maybe?

Hmm....

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

Uh-oh...that could well be what it stood for!

Though I'd bet in actuality, the "H" could've stood for "homeless."