Thursday, January 10, 2008

Flames in Kenya

The recent elections and post-election riots in Kenya bring forward great sorrow and also give one pause. Is this another situation where Africans tear each other apart, one may ask? How is it that people who have lived next to one another can go after each other in what appears to be the wink of an eye?

As odd as it may sound, I found myself, in reading about the Kenya crisis, thinking about an episode from Rod Serling’s legendary TV series The Twilight Zone. The episode is called “The Monsters are due on Maple Street” and it involves a power failure in a neighborhood that cuts the community off from the outside world and is completely inexplicable. A particular home, however, seems to continue to receive power. The family in that home has kept very much to themselves and has not been interacting with their neighbors. Suspicions fly that this family is either somehow connected to the power failure or knows something that they are not telling. The neighborhood ultimately erupts into violence. At the end of the episode, it turns out that aliens were behind the power failure, testing whether they can get humans to destroy themselves.

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