The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street Theme: Mankind is its own worst enemy
One major theme of "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" by Rod Sterling is that mankind is its own worst enemy. The first example is that the neighbors who have known each other for years begin to blame Les Goodman because his car started. They even watched his house when it got dark. This evidence tells us that it took almost nothing for the neighbors who have known each other for the last five years to turn on one another. Next, the neighbors resort to violence and begin destroying the town just because the lights went out. This shows the town destroying itself for no good reason. Finally, you see aliens talking about how easy it was to make the town of Maple Street turn on itself in a short amount of time. What this tells us is that all the aliens had to do was turn a couple of lights off to make the town descend into madness These examples show how the town of Maple Street destroyed itself. This conveys the theme that mankind is its own worst enemy.