From ‘The Twilight Zone: The Monsters are Due on Maple Street’ by Rod Serling (adapted by Mark Kneece), a mysterious blackout strikes the suburbs. The townsfolk gather and a boy suggests that it might be the work of invading aliens, who are simply waiting in the dark to grab whoever ventures into it, saying that they might even be human-like, living among them now. The folks then rationalise various conspiracy theories and demonise one another. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy when the groundless belief that there are monsters among them bring out the monsters of paranoia and hatred within them, resulting in crazed arson and murder. Most ironically, a couple of aliens were watching in the distance, discussing their observation.
Alien 1: Understand the procedure now? Just stop a few of their machines, shut down their energy sources, eliminate the reassuring flow of pictures and sounds [TV and radio] to their primitive minds, throw them into darkness for a few hours… sit back and watch the pattern.
Alien 2: And this pattern is always the same?
Alien 1: With few variations. All we need it sit back and watch as they destroy themselves.
Alien 2: Then I take it this place… this Maple Street… is not unique?
Alien 1: 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…
In the actual now classic Twilight Zone episode, Rod Serling would narrate, ‘The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices – found only in the pettiness of the human mind. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all 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.’ Though this apocalyptic episode was aired in 1960, the genuinely creepy part of this essentially non-supernatural tale is that it still seems credible, despite the ‘end’ of the Cold War. As long as the Three Poisons of greed, hate and delusion are rife in our world, we already dwell in the darkness of the Twilight Zone. Just as the the integrity of the Dharma in our world can only be destroyed by Buddhists who do not practise the Buddhadharma well, the integrity of humanity lies in the hands of humans.
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