The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street

I recently watched one of those old Twilight Zone episodes. It was from 1960, called The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street. It's a typical 1960's neighborhood, then something flies overhead. "I think it was a meteor." But things start going strange. All the power goes out. Someone decides to drive downtown to see what's going on, but the car won't start. When he decided to walk, a kid warns him, "Don't do it! They won't let you! I read about it in my books. They put an alien family here, but they look like humans. It's an invasion!" Yeah, right, kid. But when strange things happen in the neighborhood -- a car starts on its own or lights go on and off in a house -- tensions are high, looking for the alien that looks like a human. Eventually, a neighbor gets shot. And as they pan away, real aliens are talking: "You see the strategy? Just mess with their structures and they'll kill each other for us."

You've heard the story, I'm sure. A couple of black men refused to leave a Philadelphia Starbucks, so the police were called. The outrage was fierce. I was intrigued by the picture of protesters (the middle of which was white ... I thought they weren't allowed to protest on these things) who called for Starbucks to be gone. "#NOMORESTARBUCKS" the sign read. Really. Gone?

You've heard the story, I'm sure. Among all the names already out there, Morgan Freeman came under fire in a CNN report that said that 8 women were accusing him of sexual abuse. Freeman denied it, suggesting that he was misunderstood. It didn't matter. He was immediately out of work, at least for a job in Vancouver and with Visa. Originally we held people "innocent until proven guilty." Later it became "guilty until proven innocent." Not anymore. There are no innocent males. If you're accused, you're guilty, and there is no "proven innocent" possible.

The show was eerily accurate, it seems. Label someone -- "homophobe" or "bigot" or "racist" or "sexist" or ... well, you get it ... and in no time we're shooting first and asking questions later. Are we in the Twilight Zone. No, we're under the prince of the power of the air, what Paul calls "children of wrath." (Eph 2:2-3) We're just proving his point.