When I was a kid, I remember watching the film version of the H.G. Wells classic, War of the Worlds. You remember - the Martians come down to Earth in their manta-ray-lookin' spacecraft and deal out complete death and destruction from the electric eyes mounted on their Dr. Octopus-like electric eyes. Zap! Nothing can stop them. Why, I think they even zapped whole tanks. American tanks! That was pretty shocking to my young mind, raised as it was on Saturday afternoon movies. Only Japanese and German tanks were supposed to get zapped like that. The American tanks were supposed to be the indestructible ones that saved the day.

Not against this foe. Humanity was doomed (and as a consequence, democracy and "our way of life," as well).

But something happened. Just as everyone is ready to say goodbye to a few million years of evolution, the disintegration rays fall silent. This great, technologically advanced civilization is felled in its tracks by...the common cold.

That's right, one minute you're riding high, rolling up human civilization, the next minute the guy next to you sneezes and it's all over.

They just weren't ready for it. Sure, they probably had their own diseases and bacteria up there on Mars, but this was something completely different. This they just weren't ready for. For us it was a simple sniffle, but for them it was something so severe it was the end of them. We could handle it. It was, in a way, a part of us. They couldn't. For them , the common cold wasn't common at all. It was something alien and terrible.

Another more serious example in the same vein: Prior to the mass arrival of Europeans on the North American continent. Prior to the colonization of America, the small-pox infested blankets, the guns, raids and wars, there were small numbers of "white" people who landed in America - explorers, fishermen, trappers. With them came European diseases mild and severe, but all diseases that Europeans, through centuries of immune-system development and population culls had come to handle without devastation.

The natives couldn't. For them, these diseases were something completely new. Scholars estimate that as much as 90% of the native North American population had already been wiped out by the year 1600. Think about those numbers for a moment. That's a kill that puts the Black Death to shame.

They just had no way of handling this new alien threat. Neither their auto-immune systems, nor their social-systems, which tended toward communal assistance to the sick, rather than the practice of quarantine which they knew nothing of, were up to the challenge.

There are times when I feel like one of those Martians, all sealed up in the ship, when one of his crew mates decides to open up the vents to get a little fresh air, or like a native warrior who finds some white guy washed up on the beach and turns to his buddy and says, "You do the mouth to mouth."

In my pre-9/11 days, there was a particular category of demon that formed the core of my left-of-center Hell on Earth world-view - the Religious Fundamentalist. This creature, personified by such people as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Phyllis Schlafly posed the greatest threat to life, limb and way of life short of nuclear war that could possibly be imagined.

They and their followers were this sort of looming menace seeking to gobble us up, deny us our freedoms and force us to live in the manner of their choosing. Politicians could count on my support in inverse proportion to the degree in which I found overlap between they and the Religious Right. Card carrying member of the ACLU? Yes!

I still hear people talking that way, as if these men and women and what they represent are the greatest threat to us and our way of life that we face. In some ways yes, they are "dangerous"...as far as it goes. I haven't exactly gone running into the arms of the this end of the Right, though they no longer pose to me the great, overarching threat they once seemed to. Heck, I don't even mind watching the 700 Club late at night when I can't sleep. It's kind of soothing.

No, I'm not particularly enamored of their stances on Homosexuality, fetal tissue research, school prayer and a number of other issues, but here's the thing. This is a domestic threat. It's one that's existed for a long time and we can deal with it. Our systems can deal with it. In fact, generally speaking, we're winning, sometimes in fact, we've gone too far (no more donations to the ACLU for me). Our immune systems - the Constitution, our legal system, our ability to speak out - can and have protected us. There's a balance there that we've achieved and it's worked, more or less, well.

There is, however, a new threat, a new kind of threat from abroad that may just throw that balance out of whack and I believe my readers will know what that threat is. It is the threat of international terrorism and Islamic radicalism. It is the threat of the partnership between the far Left which hides its true agenda behind the label of Human Rights and Middle Eastern Judenhass Fascism who's goals we all should be familiar with by now.

This is a new type of threat - one which is far worse and far more deadly than Ralph Reed on his worst day. If these guys get their way, there won't be any ACLU, because there won't be any CL. And the violent techniques they use are something wholly different, and that makes the danger they pose something far more acute, and far more deserving of attention than any issue we've seen to date.

So when I hear people now complaining about the "Christian Right," at the same time they pretend that the War on Terror is all just a manipulative trick played by a Republican President. I wonder whether they've been living on the same planet as I have these past few years. I understand where they're coming from, but I wonder why they're still there. Did they not see what I did when the towers fell? Did they not see that that was not an isolated, singular event, but the culmination of a progression of events - a progression that isn't over yet.

Many of my friends are still stuck, posing with the old fears and prejudices while I've moved on. There is a new danger that stalks the American continent once again. We need not to be searching amongst ourselves for old enemies - enemies we've proven time and time again that we can control. We need to be ready to defend ourselves from this new threat, get our immune systems in order and hope we can do what many others could not - turn a plague into a simple cough.