“The Educators Are Coming! The Educators Are Coming!”
Summary: Never Mind the Barbarians Outside the Gates. What About the Ones Inside?
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Ever since history began, there were always bad guys trying to smash through the gates. Sometimes the barbarians had a bigger army or greater cunning; but by common agreement “barbarians” are always the less civilized, the less educated. They were the outsiders, rude and crude, trying to pull down temples of wisdom they did not value or understand.
Goths and Vandals, Visigoths and Huns, Mongols and Vikings–they showed up on your borders and you knew hell was upon you.
In the 20th century, the West viewed the Communists as the new barbarians. A movie made in 1966–“The Russians Are Coming” — exactly captured the paranoia, the fear, the terror, that these Asiatic barbarians would swoop down on our society and destroy it.
Well, we’ve still got enemies outside the gate. But I worry that the most dangerous people we have to deal with today are already inside the gates. They live amongst us, eating in our restaurants, strolling along our sidewalks, occupying positions of power and responsibility, pretending to be more or less like us. Indeed, the crucial differences are hidden in the mental chemistry, the ideological DNA. These invaders resemble us, but they seem not to be human, not in the usual way. They are like the pod people in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” And like the pod people, they seem determined to convert humans into empty shells.
