It’s no secret that I love Star Trek. On nights like tonight, it’s useful to remind myself why.

I wasn’t around in the sixties, but it was clearly a decade of turmoil. The Cold War. The Kennedy Assassination. Vietnam. Red China… Not to get all Billy Joel about it, but prospects for the future must’ve seemed bleaker with every morning edition.

In the middle of all that cultural turmoil and uncertainty came a piece of science fiction that had the audacity to say that in spite of everything going on right NOW, mankind could get through it. We could overcome the gravities of our planet and our cultures and explode into space in a spirit of insatiable curiosity.

Whatever it was on the surface, there was something about Star Trek that lit a spark in the imaginations of so many people. They looked through their tiny TV sets into a window of one possible future. A future where society valued the pursuits of knowledge and wisdom about all else. A future where someone from Russia and someone from the United States might as well have been next-door neighbors. A future where a white man could salute a black woman.

And here we are in another tumultuous decade. Decades. 9/11. Afghanistan! Iraq! Mortgage crisis! Healthcare! Unemployment! Lybia! Syria! Egypt! ISIS! Immigration! Ferguson! Thinking about human experience in the last 20 years is an exhausting exercise for me, a person who pretty much won the lottery when it comes to races, countries and families to be born into. I have no doubt I lack the fortitude to weather any one of those storms firsthand. I can’t even imagine.

Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now hokey and outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared an impossible hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. In light of all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. By all accounts we need stories of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them.

Roddenberry himself has a mixed reputation at best, and I have no interest in defending the man. Whatever he did or whatever he was, the thing that matters to me is the vision that outgrew him. That vision is what we need to remember and what we need to fight for. The world can only get better one person at a time. We can only reach for the stars if we have an Earth to stand on.

Some people find inspiration in the message of optimist fiction like Star Trek. Some people find dystopian warnings like 1984 more rousing. Still others seek guidance and comfort in their religion and spirituality. Whatever your take is, the thing I care about is this: We just need to be better. We need to believe we can be better. We have to stare the horror of the present in the face and look past it to the future we can build if we are good to each other.

We can only hope that change will happen, and by fooling ourselves with that hope can we actually make it happen. Empathy, kindness, respect. Goodness. Wherever we find our inspiration to be good, we need to find it now. Now is the time to make the world better so that among all of our possible futures we can live in the one that sees us boldly going, together and all of us, where no one has gone before.