"Dust"

I loved "The Twilight Zone" when I was a kid.  There are about 150 episodes, of which I still remember some.

In recent years and even decades, some TV network or other has shown "Twilight Zone" marathons on New Years' Eve day and New Years' day.

Many people who became famous later acted in some of those episodes.

Recently, I bought from ebay the whole series.  And I've been watching them, maybe three or four 24-minute episodes in a sitting.

Many of these episodes were written by Rod Serling, who I read developed "The Twilight Zone" after his proposal to write something about the murder of Emmett Till was rejected.  You can see some of that hopeless tragedy in a number of "Twilight Zone" episodes.

An episode I watched today, and which I didn't remember, was called "Dust."  It was the story of a Mexican man who was despairing over the misery of his life, got drunk, accidentally ran over and killed a young girl with his horse-drawn wagon, and was to be hanged.  The villagers came out to watch the spectacle.  One man brought his wife and children.

Serling introduced the episode this way: "This village had a virus shared by its people.  It was the germ of squalor, of hopelessness, of a loss of faith.  With the faithless, the hopeless, the misery-laden, there is time -- ample time --to engage in one of the other pursuits of men: they begin to destroy themselves [and each other]."

Thomas Gomez, whose character was a hustler, a drinker himself, and an opportunist and conman, had sold the village the rope to hang the convict, and sold the convict's family, at a highly inflated cost, of course, "magic dust" (which he simply scooped up from the ground), which he told the convicted man's father would turn the villagers' hate into love.

When an attempt to hang the convict was made, the rope broke.  The parents of the accidentally killed girl, who had come to see "justice" done, decided one death was enough, and gave the sheriff permission to let the convict go, instead of trying again to hang him.  If the convict's family were deeply relieved, it was Thomas Gomez's character who was unspeakably puzzled.  He gave the money he took from the convict's father to the convict's children.