The story, written by Rod Serling, takes place in a close-knit neighborhood on Maple Street, in an unnamed city. Strange things begin to happen (flashing lights, power outages, and the like), and the fractures develop between the once-close neighbors as, fueled by fanciful science-fiction stories, they become convinced one of them part of an alien invasion of Earth. (Remember, this is The Twilight Zone we're dealing with.) Eventually, a mob mentality takes hold of the neighborhood, there's a death, accusations fly (along with bullets and rocks), and the the neighborhood devolves into a riot.
There are no monsters, of course—or, rather, there are monsters; they just aren't playing the role we suspect. They are watching the disintegration of civilized behavior on Maple Street from a hillside where their spaceship landed. They haven't come near the street; all they've done is cause a few lights to flash and the power to go on and off, and the humans did the rest. They observe how they'll be able to colonize Earth neighborhood by neighborhood, and we'll make it possible: all they have to do is fiddle with the expected, to "take away human comforts and throw in an element of fear and humans will seek out their natural enemy: themselves." That quote comes from The Twilight Zone Vortex, and it's as good as you'll find.
Allegorical interpretations abound. Serling clearly intends this to be one of his "message" scripts; his closing narration states that "thoughts, attitudes, prejudices" are weapons found only in our minds, and that "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." It could be a warning about racism. It could be a treatise on the Red Scare. And it's timeless: it could be about terrorism, immigration—even COVID-19.
Have you noticed how people are being urged to "snitch" on people they see violating the norms of "social distancing"? (And boy, I'll be happy to never see or hear that Newspeak term again.) We hear of cases of social media ridiculing individuals who fail to join in nightly neighborhood celebrations of health workers. And predictably, the response to the virus has divided along political and ideological lines. Liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, red states and blue, make claims, exchange accusations, and hurl invective. Those who claim to be protecting lives are called tyrants; those who claim to be protecting jobs are called traitors. If we don't close everything up, people will die. If we don't open everything up, people will die. And, as is always the case, anyone who disagrees with us is a fool. We're in this together? Give me a frigging break.
If there's one thing we've learned in the last decade or so, it's that social media presents a highly distorted view of society, and so it's possible that the nation really has attained a level of unity not seen since World War II. It's possible. But it will be interesting to see what kind of world we live in when this pandemic ends. Will the businesses forced to close ever reopen, and will the workers laid off regain their jobs? Will the public scolds keep at it, or will they go back into their dark holes? Will things get back to normal, or is this, as some people have suggested, the "new" normal? What will the future be like?
In one of his more memorable quotes, Harry Reasoner, the CBS and ABC newsman, once cautioned against a society pursuing hypersafety:
The idea of trying to outguess life, to avoid everything that might conceivably injure your life, is a peculiarly dangerous one. Pretty soon you are existing in a morass of fear. A man makes a sort of deal with life, he gives up things because they are undignified or immoral; if life asks him to cringe in front of all reasonable indulgence, he may at the end say life is not worth it. Because for the cringing he may get one day extra or none; he never gets eternity.
I think we've forgotten that; in fact, I'm not sure how many of today's generations ever even considered this. We react today to life, and to our fellow man, with fear and paranoia. But as Reasoner says, danger comes in different disguises. Some might say that, in the panic of the moment, it is too dangerous to consider the the post-virus future. If not now, though, when? The future is only one second away; if we keep putting it off, we'll only guarantee that the present remains the same. And then who will The Monsters be? TV
