Rod Serling was a gifted storyteller. His “Twilight Zone” television series with themes of social commentary are as relevant today as they were in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the show was aired in prime time.

One of his episodes, “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” from 1960, was ranked in the top 10 of all “The Twilight Zone” programs.

The story begins on Maple Street, USA in late summer. Kids are laughing, playing. An ice cream man rings his bell as he travels down the tree-lined street. Parents are busy tending their lawns and gardens. It’s another happy day in suburban America.

A flash of light and a loud roar from the sky pass over the street. The residents dismiss the event as a meteor from far away. Suddenly, all their power goes off. Stoves, radios, cars, phones and lawnmowers no longer work.

After reading a comic book about an alien invasion, Tommy, a young boy, tells two of the men who want to investigate the power outage not to leave Maple Street. He says that the sight and sound over their street came from a spaceship that landed nearby. Tommy says some of the aliens are disguised as humans and have caused the outage to isolate the neighborhood.

The boy’s comic book story catches fire with the residents.

One of the street’s homeowners can’t start his car, but as he walks away, the car starts by itself. The neighbors suspect that he might be an alien. Tensions on the street mount. Two men try to keep everyone calm as they look for a cause for the chaos. Finger-pointing escalates in droves. One resident who has the only working radio is accused of communicating with the aliens.

As night falls, all eyes are on everyone. Is there only one alien on Maple Street or more? Steve, a self- proclaimed leader, warns that the building anger will cause the residents to “eat each other up alive.”

A shadowy figure walks down the street. Tommy shouts that it’s an alien. As the figure gets closer, a man named Charlie shoots it with his shotgun. As they approach the dead body, they realize it’s Pete Van Horn, one of their neighbors. Everyone chases Charlie and throws stones at him, thinking that he must be the alien.

Charlie screams that Tommy is the alien because he knew of the invasion.

Lights flash on and off in every house. Total panic becomes an all-out riot. Windows are smashed. Guns are fired. People are crushed by the feet of those trying to escape the neighborhood.

Meanwhile, up on top of a hill overlooking Maple Street, humanoid aliens flip switches on a machine that turns the power on and off.

One alien says to another, “Understand the procedure now? Just stop a few of their machines and radios and telephones and lawnmowers. Throw them into darkness for a few hours and then sit back and watch the pattern. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find ... and it’s themselves.”

The aliens in the story devised a clever plan to take over Earth. They won’t need supernatural powers or special weapons. They created a situation of concern by shutting off the power to the street. Eventually panic became finger-pointing. Finger-pointing became anger, and anger caused death and destruction.

Rod Serling must have had physic abilities. “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” is happening in America right now. Just like what happened on Maple Street, we Americans will “eat each other up alive” if we soon don’t realize the serious predicament of the current state of our union.

If the plan is to keep Americans arguing and divided, our “alien” government and Congress are succeeding. Republicans blame Democrats. Democrats blame Republicans. We the people have drawn lines in the sand. We are no longer “One nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all,” words learned by every school child that have lost meaning.

Just like the people on Maple Street, we too have a collective fear. The Left and the Right want an America that neither can have. Anger rages. Immigrants are stereotyped and vilified. Citizens have been shot to death by federal agents. Even Jesus Christ is at the center of the controversy. His name is used as a political weapon inside the wars that currently rage across our planet.

If Serling had taken a different direction in his story and his residents on Maple Street had bonded together, the aliens would have realized that a complete takeover of humanity would have required much more than their simple plan. We should take notice. Our people haven’t been this divided since the Civil War.

United we stand. Divided we fall.

At the end of his TV episode, Serling said these words that still ring true today:

“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 only to The Twilight Zone.”

Serling’s prediction was right. “Prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy.”

His fiction has become our fact. Our country is a balloon filled with angry voices that’s ready to burst. Maple Street is real. Right here. Right now. But our monsters are not aliens from outer space. They are human and living on Earth.

The monsters are us.

Email Rich Strack at richiesadie11@gmail.com