“The Baby Boom was the first generation to grow up with television.”

You’re going to hear this observation many times in your life. I guess it’s supposed to reveal something about people your age and the way they see the world, and maybe it does in the larger scheme of things. But you’ve never known a world without TV. It’s just always been there. Once, when you were a little baby, you saw a working television for the very first time. You don’t remember it, of course, but to you this weird apparatus probably made as much sense as anything else. Life itself was so very new.

A lot of what you see on television is okay, I guess, but many years from now—in the distant future—you’ll look back and realize a lot of it was junk: idiotic game shows, westerns, war stories, family situation comedies that don’t even remotely remind you of real life, and hieroglyphic test patterns. You do like Superman, of course, and the Saturday morning cartoon marathons. And you absolutely love the old Laurel and Hardy comedies (trust me, these guys will never NOT be funny!). But you hadn’t found anything of what the future likes to call “Must-See-TV” …until The Twilight Zone came along.

You heard the first mysterious notes of the show’s theme music from your bedroom and you were hooked. You didn’t even get to see the first few episodes because it came on after your bedtime. But you weren’t a baby anymore. You were 8! And besides, the show ran on a Friday! It wouldn’t kill you to stay awake for another half-hour, you argued. So you’ll just sleep a little later in the morning. You made a good case, but it still took several weeks of begging before Mom and Dad caved. But finally they did, and you haven’t missed an episode since.

The first episode you ever got to watch was called “Time Enough at Last.” It told the story of a far-sighted and standoffish bank teller named Henry Bemis, who loved to read…so much that he preferred books to people. Every day he would eat his lunch alone in the bank’s underground vault so as not to be disturbed. And one day this practice saves him from a nuclear blast and the apparent arrival of World War III. He emerges from the vault to find his city in ruins and everyone in it dead. He almost despairs until he comes upon the remains of the Public Library and discovers thousands of intact books. He realizes that he can now read whatever and whenever he wants…without interruption from pesky humans. But as he reaches for the first book he stumbles and his thick reading glasses fall to the ground and shatter. The story ends with Henry sitting all alone among the rubble and the countless books he’ll never be able to read.

In the future, you’ll realize that the special effects in “Time Enough at Last.” are quite primitive, and that Henry wouldn’t have been able to get through a single book even if he hadn’t broken his glasses. The radiation would have been that toxic. On some level, you’re aware of these flaws even now. But it doesn’t matter, does it? Because the story still gave you a heightened awareness of the need for human companionship, and your first-ever example of a delicious something called irony.

The Twilight Zone almost never disappoints you. It inspires thoughts of the future, a topic of which you will never grow weary. There are tales of space travel, and life on other planets, and time travel, and nuclear war, and other dimensions. The Devil even shows up in a few episodes. But it is more than simply a science fiction show, isn’t it? It stretches your young mind and teaches you important lessons. It shows how flawed and silly humans can be, how fear and paranoia can bring out their inner monsters. It celebrates individuality and casts a critical eye on the demand for conformity. It unmasks the self-destructive idiocies of totalitarianism and racism, and it extols the heroic selfless act.

It takes you—in the show’s opening words—“to another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of the imagination.” Finally it reveals that life itself…the life you are living right now…is (or can be) that “wondrous land.”

There will be people in the future who will insist that life’s an either/or situation. They’ll wave the Constitution or the Bible or the Qur’an or the Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract at you and insist that it’s all there in black and white. And they’ll insist there is no gray area. But because you had open-minded parents, and because of a mind-altering television show you watched as kid you’ll be well prepared to meet their challenge. You’ll know that there are no easy answers and that life is ALL gray area. In some sense you’ll realize that you’ve been in The Twilight Zone all along.