Fear like the throbbing strokes of engine pistons, each like a heartbeat, parceling out of every hour into breathless minutes of watching, waiting and dreading… For the year is 1942, and this particular ship has lost its convoy. But what is never recorded in a log is the fear that washes over a deck like fog and ocean spray. Duly recorded on the ship’s log is the sailing time, course to destination, weather conditions, temperature, longitude and latitude. At this moment she’s one day out of Liverpool, her destination New York. He’s alive because through these things we keep him alive.” Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember that when he comes to your town. “Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare - Chicago? Los Angeles? Miami, Florida? Vincennes, Indiana? Syracuse, New York? Anyplace, everyplace, where there’s hate, where there’s prejudice, where there’s bigotry. A case to be filed under “M” for “Mankind” - in The Twilight Zone.” Any state, any entity, any ideology which fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man…that state is obsolete. Any state, entity, or ideology becomes obsolete when it stockpiles the wrong weapons: when it captures territories, but not minds when it enslaves millions but convinces nobody when it is naked, yet puts on armor and calls it faith, while in the Eyes of God it has no faith at all. But so is the State, the entity he worshiped. “The chancellor, the late chancellor, was only partly correct.
The place is New York City and this is the eve of the end, because even at midnight it’s high noon, the hottest day in history, and you’re about to spend it in the Twilight Zone.” The time is five minutes to twelve, midnight.
And all of man’s little devices to stir up the air are now no longer luxuries-they happen to be pitiful and panicky keys to survival. One month ago, the Earth suddenly changed its elliptical orbit and in doing so began to follow a path which gradually, moment by moment, day by day, took it closer to the sun. Bronson is unable to put into the hot, still, sodden air is ‘doomed,’ because the people you’ve just seen have been handed a death sentence. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God’s Earth.” And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes – all of them. “There is an answer to the doctor’s question. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone." 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. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices…to be found only in the minds of men. "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. And he’ll smile then too, because he’ll know it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man’s mind, that are a part of the Twilight Zone.” And perhaps across his mind there’ll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth.
And also like all men, perhaps there’ll be an occasion, maybe a summer night sometime, when he’ll look up from what he’s doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. Successful in most things but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives-trying to go home again. “Martin Sloan, age thirty-six, vice-president in charge of media.
0 kommentar(er)
