
Narrator: What you are about to watch is a nightmare. It is not meant to be prophetic, it need not happen, it’s the fervent and urgent prayer of all men of good will that it never shall happen. But in this place, in this moment, it does happen. This is the Twilight Zone.
An Air Raid alert happens one night…
Dr. Bill Stockton: You better get on home and get into your shelter… eh, your basement, and I’d board up the windows if I were you.
Jerry Harlowe: Bill, we don’t have any cellar, remember? The advantages of modern architecture, we have the only modern house on the block. We get everything at your beck and call, everything at your fingertips, even got an electric launderer right off the back room. All the wonders of modern science taken into account except that thing that’s heading here right now…
The neighbors who, an hour before celebrated the doctor’s birthday, decide to invade the fallout shelter…
Man: Why don’t we get some kind of battering ram?
Frank Henderson: Yeah, we could go over to Bennett Avenue, Phil Cline has some heavy pipe in his basement, I’ve seen it.
Man: No, no, that would bring him into the act too, and who cares about saving him? No, if we do that, we’ll let all those people know we have a shelter on our street. We’ll have a whole mob to contend with, with a whole bunch of strangers.
Mrs. Henderson: Sure, and what right have they got to come over here? This isn’t their street, this isn’t *their* shelter.
Jerry Harlowe: Ohhhh, this is *our* shelter, and on the next street that’s another country. Patronize home industries, you idiots, you fools, you’re insane, all of you…
The battering ram forces the fallout shelter’s door to break…and then the Alert is revoked.
Jerry Harlowe: Hey that’s a great idea, block party, anything to get back to normal, huh?
Dr. Bill Stockton: Normal? I don’t know. I don’t know what normal is. I thought I did once. I don’t anymore.Jerry Harlowe: I told you we’d pay for the damages, Bill.
Dr. Bill Stockton: Damages? I wonder. I wonder if anyone of us has any idea what those damages really are. Maybe one of them is finding out what we’re really like when we’re normal; the kind of people we are just underneath the skin. I mean all of us: a bunch of naked wild animals, who put such a price on staying alive that they’d claw their neighbors to death just for the privilege. We were spared a bomb tonight, but I wonder if we weren’t destroyed even without it.
No moral, no message, no prophetic tract, just a simple statement of fact: for civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized. Tonight’s very small exercise in logic from the Twilight Zone.
The Twilight Zone The Shelter (1961)
For civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized.
Rod Serling was a genius; lately I’ve been watching a lot of Twilight Zone episodes. They make a lot more sense to me, than other stories.
I’m not sure what ‘civilized’ means, anymore. The last 6 years in America has changed a lot of my beliefs. Politically, my “Give a Damn” is still broken. My concept of White American Evangelical Christianity is also broken. These two are connected.

“When I met Sudan, the remaining northern white rhinos were all in zoos, safe from poaching but with limited success at breeding. Conservationists had hatched a bold plan to airlift four of the rhinos to Kenya. The rhinos, it was hoped, would be stimulated by their ancestral habitat’s air, water, food, and room to roam. They would breed, and their offspring could be used to repopulate Africa.
When I first heard of this plan, it sounded to me like something out of a children’s story. But I quickly realized that this was a desperate, last-ditch effort to save a species…
How did we arrive at the point where such desperate measures were necessary? It’s astonishing that a demand for rhino horn based on little more than superstition has caused the wholesale slaughter of a species. But it’s encouraging that a disparate group of people came together in an attempt to save something unique and precious, something that once lost would be gone forever…”
This story appears in the October 2019 issue of National Geographic magazine.
An international team of researchers led by the National Autonomous University (UNAM) has found that since the year 1900, about 477 different species have become extinct because of continued human degradation and destruction of natural habitats.
They found that for every 10,000 species in the world, about two of them die off every century.
In the past 100 years alone, however, about 500 species have become extinct instead of the nine species that would have been expected at natural rates.
These extinct species include 158 fish, 146 amphibians, 80 birds, 69 mammals and 24 reptiles. The researchers said these estimates are highly conservative at best.
While such a study is susceptible to overestimation of modern-day extinction rates, especially given the limited data available, the researchers placed a floor on their figures so that the conservative extinction rates they arrived at would not be any lower given the data they had.
This means their findings are much more significant because even with the conservative estimates, they were able to calculate for extinction rates that are much higher compared to the background extinction rate, or the rate at which species are lost without any human impact involved.
We are destroying Earth and mega-billionaires are playing ‘space tourists’ when they could feed the people who have little, or end homelessness. Would-be-astronauts who can’t pass the physical.
Politicians are arguing over who has the power to run government while they could be creating legislation that actually makes the world better, safer. Politicians are spouting nonsense about conspiracy theories, so that they can attract media attention, so that they can attract contributors who will provide them with the money they need to finance publicity so they can stay in office and spout nonsense about conspiracy theories.
I long ago learned that the only person I can change is myself; but only if I want to make the change. The most we can do for people we believe need changing, is to provide an environment the person can come to, if they decide they need to change. But we cannot change them. They are the only ones that can change themselves.
“What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.”
“Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their peers, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.”
“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.”
Robert F. Kennedy