Tribute

Newsweek has a nice tribute online written by Rabbi Gellman to three actors that have died in the past nine months in his article  Symbols of Our Times:Scotty, Gilligan and Fife were TV characters who showed us the importance of doing our best. He desribes how each character "played as metaphors of our lives in these broken times" :

 Scotty represents all of us who are constantly asked to do theimpossible and to meet unreasonable deadlines by bosses who just don'tunderstand that you can't run engines at warp speed after Klingons haveblasted the engine room ... So many people I know feel like Scotty and so few like Captain Kirk. So many of us say, “I canno give ya more power captain.  The enginesare already overloaded!” And then…we do.

Gilligan represents all of us who are congenitally happy despite our circumstances...Yes he was a buffoon (actually more a schlemiel than a buffoon) but aren't we all?...Gilligan had no desire for promotion and this makes sense to me now.  A truly happy person is already at the highest rung.

Don Knotts as Deputy Fife personified the klutz who is convinced that despite everything he is destined for bigger things. Deputy Fife was all bluster with just one bullet, and that is just likemany of us.  The bullet is self-confidence.  Do you remember when geekswere ridiculed?  Now they run the world and the reason is that they areclueless about criticism and focused only on the road ahead.