I’ve always been afraid of that happening. Not the bit about aliens taking over the earth, I mean the bit about the majority of the population covertly (yet systematically) weeding out the minority. YOU know…getting rid of the nonconformists. The people who dress how they like and don’t care what people say, that are unafraid of speaking out, that aren’t “normal”.
The “normal” people don’t like individualists very much, especially before they’re old enough to enter high school. That’s when I first saw Body Snatchers, when I was dealing with puberty in “middle school” (sometimes called Junior High), or as Matt Groening called it: The Deepest Pit in Hell. All those raging hormones tend to have weird effects on your psyche, and to add to this toxic mind-mess I was also trying my hardest to fit in with the crowd at my school. Suffice it say I wasn’t very successful at it. I have never been able to truly “fit in” with the majority, and so I lived in perpetual fear about being exposed for what I really was – different. Body Snatchers intensified that fear.
I kept imagining a classmate stopping me in the school hallway, pointing and then letting loose with that gaspy moaning while everybody nearby grabbed me. What they did with me afterwards was too gruesome to even contemplate – just the idea of getting grabbed by a mob was terrifying all by itself. The shame of being “outed" as not-normal in public was almost as bad, barely overshadowed by tortures-to-come that were left unspoken.
I first became aware of the "normal" situation around the same time. I even remember the exact moment – I was in my seventh grade math class. The teacher was covering some algebraic topic that most of the class just couldn’t seem to understand, so he had to go over it again and again and again. I kept watching the confused looks on my classmates faces with a certain amount of confusion myself. You see, I understood the concept he was talking about, but it took a good 10 extra minutes of explaining and using multiple examples before light bulbs started going off in my classmates' heads.
I “got it” from the first example he had given, but I was clearly the only one who did. Once I realized this, I looked at the other students in amazement – up until that moment in time I had always considered myself to be normal, existing as best I could, right alongside everyone else. Not anymore. Suddenly, I was out in front, waiting for the others to catch up. Surprised, I realized I was part of the minority. Even worse, it was in MATH!
Math is a subject that few people have a real aptitude for; most kids I knew hated it. I’m no mathematical genius but I’m not bad at it, and Math and English were always my best courses in school. Some quick calculations done in my head underscored this fact: I knew there were about 20 students in that class. One person out of 20 is 5%. I also applied a little logic: if I was at one end of the spectrum, it was reasonable to assume that there’d be someone else at the other end; someone who would take even longer than average to understand any given topic. That was another 5%, but that still left 90% of the class. Ninety percent!
I knew right away that if I ever pissed off the other 18 (possibly 19) kids in the class, I was in deep doo-doo. One against all of them equals I get my butt handed to me. The numbers were clearly on their side, not mine. Being rather shy and quiet, that fact was extremely frightening to me, which explains why I sat there terrified into silence. Even scarier was the realization that that class was not special. There was nothing in the area I grew up in that was extraordinary in any way, it was an average middle-class suburb. Those 18 kids were normal, a representative sample that could have been taken from anywhere in the country. I didn’t fit the "normal" mold. Over the years I’ve managed to learn a few tricks on how to get along with the “norms”, but I’ve accepted being part of the minority ever since.
I’m still scared of pseudo-humans pointing and screaming at me, tho.