I recently read The Stories We Tell by Mike Cosper. It’s a theological exploration of themes in modern story-telling as they play out in television and film. It’s not a heavy read, and as thoroughly entertaining as it is thought-provoking.
Stories capture themes that are timeless, warning of futures that could happen. Sometimes they peek out from the past, old stories that suddenly become appropos, that we perhaps wish had been heard and considered more thoughtfully back then. Cosper quotes one of those, from the Twilight Zone:
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 its own…” Rod Sterling, “The Twilight Zone”
I think that it’s import to consider today what the fallout of our suspicions, prejudices, and searches for scapegoats will be the future. Perhaps our children will wonder why we didn’t listen to our stories.