Are You Ready to Be Raped?
The table bites sharply into your stomach as you are forcefully bent over it. You reflexively try to reach your hands out to spare the impact to your head; too bad they are tied firmly behind your back. The pain blossoms in your nose, almost making you black out, as it is first to greet its hard surface.
As your head bounces back up, you see the coughing, spasming figure of your husband, George; his blood forming an ever-spreading pool as it drips steadily from his eyes and ears, and mouth and nose. You hear two of the invaders chattering away in their filthy gutter language and then laughing. Your skin crawls with your certainty that they are saying something about you. If they are going to come here, they at least should have the decency to speak American!
Their leader steps between you and George. It actually is true, all foreigners really do look alike! When he speaks, you are completely taken by surprise by his English-accented American. A small hope grows in your heart because you know that all Englishmen are homosexuals and therefore you and Judy should be safe.
That hope is dashed when you hear your 14-year old daughter's piercing screams come from upstairs as her bed springs start squeaking rhythmically. You can't help but wonder if they will let Judy attend this year's Abstinence Ball and still let her get her 3-year purity ring. It would be so unfair; it was not like Judy was wanting this or was dressing provocatively or anything like that. Still some people were so harsh in their judgments. You had the growing suspicion this year's local Abstinence Ball would be a rather small affair anyway. Still, her father would be so disappointed if she missed that.
How could the US be invaded by Godless terrorists? Did not God promise us better? We had not been like the other old, fallen empires; we had gone out of our way to treat the Jews well!
The foreigner says in his liberal, clipped, upper-class British accent, "Your husband is suffering from a virus that we released. Try not to be distressed. It only affects
men." It was scary like one of those horror movies how he never seemed to look straight at you, but kept jerking his head around to take in everything around him, his hands fluttering around almost in a blur. A cruel smile crosses his face as he adds, "Fortunately for you, we were previously inoculated against the pathogen." You freeze in terror as you think of your son, Elroy, who had gone with his church's young men's youth group to practice their "Red Dawn" tactics, catching this and dying without any family around him.
Through the distraction of the heavy smell of oily, rancid smoke. You hear more screams, this time coming from your next door neighbor, Dorothy Chen's house. The Chens were a nice Baptist family who had moved here after the Fall of Taiwan. You hoped that she and her family were going to be all right. They had a son about Judy's age. He was a proper, respectful boy who knew his place and you always hoped that he would find a nice Chinese girl to settle down with.
Their leader, who had just been speaking, moves around behind you, almost faster than you can see. He grabs the back of your dress and with a vicious yank rips the fabric apart, instantly stripping you down to your underwear. The pressure on your throat and shoulders is almost unbearable but it only lasts an instant as you feel goose bumps raise on your arms and thighs. Your panties and bra are next to go and he roughly shoves your legs further apart. What you dread is only an instant away; you have the slightest momentary consolation in the thought, "At least none of us believed in evilution!"
This post is a Jeremiad(1). The idea of America losing a war against any country's armies, much less being invaded and successfully occupied is so far beyond the realm of possibilities that is very hard to reasonably contemplate. I have not created any kinds of large-scale structures and analyses about how and why empires rise and fall like you might find in other erudite works like Charles A. Kupchan's, "The End of the American Era," or Jared Diamond's "Collapse." Still, I feel comfortable talking about one aspect of how we have stayed powerful; science and its education.
Since WWII, the US armed forces have succeeded by emphasizing two qualities; lavishly supplying our troops and having the greatest technological advantage they can over their opponents. Both of those clearly rely upon our country's scientific prowess, a prowess that has been steadily waning since the end of the Space Race. Think of how many people studying engineering and sciences are foreign born. That ratio only increases when you consider only the population of graduate students. Even more worrying is that at this point more and more foreign-born students are starting to look towards universities outside the US as providing superior scientific and engineering educations.
Largely, I blame this decline on Christian Conservatism and its fellow traveler, Creationism/Intelligent Design.(2) They have injected into the school systems such rancor and controversy about not only biology but by association the other physical sciences that young people have little interest in pursuing them because of their fear of social approbation.
I can tell you of two other would-be empires of the last century which decided to place ideology over science, the Nazis and the Soviets. While they are certainly the bogeymen of this culture, it cannot be denied they both placed such high priorities on their ideologies to the detriment of scientific research. The Nazis had the notion that relativity and quantum mechanics were somehow "Jewish physics." (3) Not that I have any complaints about the results, but it is not an accident there was no Nazi atomic bomb. (4) Similarly, the Soviets communist
ideology were opposed to Darwinian evolution and cybernetics. To this day, the remnant Russian nation lags behind in the biological and computer sciences.
Those two empires fell in the last century at least in part because of their adherence to ideology over science. It could be our tragedy if we purposely follow in their footsteps.
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiad
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Physics
(4) There were many, many reasons why the Nazis never acquired nuclear weapons. Still, it has been documented the physicists working on the Nazi atomic bomb program were repeatedly harassed by the Gestapo for their promotion and use of "Jewish physics."