The Monsters are Due on Maple Street

Over the holidays, the Sci Fi Channel played back-to-back-to-back Twilight Zones. This show used to scare the living daylights out of me when I was young. Now it's just fun to watch with its soon-to-be famous people and interesting takes on technology and the future.

The episode that caught my eye and made me laugh was a classic, The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.

Maple Street, U.S.A., late summer. A tree-lined little world of front porch gliders, barbecues, the laughter of children, and the bell of an ice-cream vendor. At the sound of the roar and the flash of light, it will be precisely 6:43 p.m. on Maple Street.

In a nutshell, aliens arrive and park their flying saucer on the edge of town. They then proceed to cause electric and mechanical devices—the power grid, a car, a lawnmower—to turn on and off randomly. In no less than 30 minutes, the residents of Maple Street have turned against one another in a kind of hysterical rioting. One is dead. The implication is that more will follow.

In the final scene, the one alien atop a nearby hill looks at the other and says something like, “See. It’s simple. We can have these bozos destroy themselves. We don’t have to lift a finger. And it works the same everywhere, every time.”

Rod Serling concludes:

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosives 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.

So, how can you tell this episode was set in the 1960s? The "Red Scare" parable? Nope. Even simpler: It took a full half hour to turn the neighbors against one another.

Today, forget the lights and car—those we can handle. But if aliens simply took out our mobile phones and Internet connections, it would take (maybe) 15 minutes for mass hysteria to develop, and 20 for the first bloodshed.

I’ve seen the panic of people whose phones have died in the airport. I’ve been at work when the power went out. I know.

That’s what I love about the old Twilight Zones; they remind us of just how far we’ve come.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

Tweet