You wake up early and click on the radio. There's no music on anymore since it has been banned, but you hope you can catch some news, even the censored kind. You run through the usual frequencies but find nothing. You click it off again and walk over to the computer. A couple of people are chatting online, but they don't seem to know any more than you do. Realizing they could be informants, you resist the urge to chime in.
How did things ever get this way?
It's almost time for the call to prayer. You remember how the radio and TV preachers used to annoy you in the days when all you had to do was turn them off. If you don't like what's on, your mother used to tell you, the button's on the outside of the set. But that doesn't exactly apply anymore. You laugh a little at how spoiled you were back then.
What would she say if she had lived to see this?
You think about the children, your own or just children in general. What will they learn in school today? How much of it will they believe?
You recall hearing early rumblings about world leaders converting and how farfetched it all sounded. You wonder when it started in your own country and how you could have been so distracted that you never saw it coming.
Right on time, the tower they built in your neighborhood emits its moan. It has no OFF switch. You appreciate, belatedly, that the old God didn't find it necessary to wake you at dawn for a prayer you didn't want to say. You wonder if He's still around somewhere, watching.
You drag yourself to the kitchen for something to eat, but there isn't a lot. The jizya tax you have to pay to maintain your dhimmi status doesn't leave much for groceries. If you would just apply for your conversion certificate, you know there would be more – but you're still too angry to give in, at least for right now.
The 21st century wasn't supposed to be like this. America wasn't supposed to be like this. Maybe the United Nations will do something. Maybe.
Cursing under your breath, you cram some crackers and a cheese into your pocket and head for the door. If you're a man, you rush off to a job that you hope is still yours. If you're a woman, you slide your blackened window open first to peek outside. The morality police don't seem to be out yet, so you grab your keys, your burqa and the last of the money you earned from the position you were forced to quit. You tiptoe down the driveway past your car and take off on foot to find some food.
You're not allowed to drive anymore, but even walking won't save you if you get caught – you're not allowed to be outside at all, at least not without a male relative to chaperone you.
And you don't have any male relatives.
Think it couldn't happen here?
We didn't think a handful of students with box cutters could bring down airliners, either, did we? But that's exactly what occurred. And our reaction after the shock wore off? A demand for immigration reform? A holding to account of every politician whose negligence made that attack possible? A reasoned examination of the religion that prompted it in the first place?
No, only guilt heaped on us from the left, for the unpardonable offense of being clearly right while our attackers were clearly wrong, in an age that despises clarity. So zealous were we to overcompensate and help the adversary save face that we failed to notice he wasn't embarrassed at all, but laughing at us for our foolishness.
Conditioned by the mainstream media to be "sensitive" and "tolerant," as we have been ever since those words first lost their definitions (I believe they now mean "hysterical" and "stupid," respectively), we declined to identify the enemy.
Instead, we let our talking heads dance around the Quranic mandate for world domination, dressing it up as "The Religion of Peace," a harmless, romantic adventure starring Rudolph Valentino or Dorothy Lamour.
But the facts remain. Wahhabism – or Salafism as it is also called – is one of the most virulent strains of a belief system that wants to kill us. It is the national religion of Saudi Arabia, our "closest ally" in the Arab Mideast. Its adherents have crashed our passenger planes into our buildings, taken over 80 percent of non-Wahhabi American mosques, and chipped away at our learning institutions and way of life with their oil money "donations" and bogus lawsuits.
These people think insensitivity and intolerance are all right. They think lying and cheating are all right. They think slavery is all right. They think wife-beating and daughter-murder are all right. They think that killing us is all right, too, even taking advantage of our misguided national hospitality to do it.
And in America, six years after 9/11, the Entertainment Generation snoozes on, rocked and lullabied by its heroes in Hollywood and the left-wing media. If the news is too harsh, change the channel. Let the government handle it; my show's coming on.
Let's hope our country wakes up to the reality of the danger we still face, before we have something worse to wake up to.
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Marylou Barry is a journalist and Christian Zionist with a special interest in the Middle East. Visit her blog, Marylou's America.