This is from one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes. Reposted here because sometimes, every once in a great while, the monsters under the bed are real. We need to keep that in mind...

 

 

The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street

"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices - to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own - for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone."

First Alien:	"Understand the procedure now? Just stop a few of their machines and radios and telephones and lawn mowers, throw them into darkness for a few hours, and then sit back and watch the pattern."
Second Alien:	"And this pattern is always the same?"
First Alien:	"With few variations. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it's themselves. All we need do is sit back and watch."
Second Alien:	"Then I take it this place, this Maple Street, is not unique?"
First Alien:	"By no means. Their world is full of Maple Streets. And we'll go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves, one to the other, one to the other, one to the other..."
		- Rod Serling from Twilight Zone episode #22 "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street" first aired Friday, March 4th, 1960

-- Arnie Rimmer (Arnie_Rimmer@usa.net), December 17, 1999

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Great catch, Arnie! It's coming back to me, and so y2k! Too bad Rod Serling couldn't be here for this time. As Spanky always said, "They never learn."

-- jor-el (jor-el@krypton.uni), December 17, 1999.

Rod Serling had a deft grasp of human nature, and his dark tableaux benifitted from being shot in black & white. Our later fantasies have all been cast...in living color...as the voice-over would have it.

It is more than frightening to imagine an unprepared populace with the lights out, and few are willing to indulge in such Boschian scenarios. Early on, the .gov types would have been apprised of the result, and decided not to unsettle the public with frightening potentialities. The reaction would have been horrific, not only for banks and the equity markets, but for society as a whole. The decision has been made, the die cast, and, as Dale Way of the IEEA put it, "we're going to sail the ship straight into the iceberg." Enjoy the end of the Twentieth Century, for afterwards, there will be a settling of accounts. Will we become another Rwanda? A Cambodia? Soccer fields turned into killing fields? Malls turned into no-man's-land?

-- Rider (WakeUp@Dawn's.Smile), December 17, 1999.