Based on the author's own extensive experience as an English language educator in a variety of traditionally non-English-speaking communities, the English language has been force-fed to them and disseminated as somehow vital to their life-chances as a neutral and value-free panacea for everything, when in fact, it is all too often a thief of their time, their money, their own tongues and thus their cultural identities, their existential well-being. After several stints, over several decades, from the 1970s until this current decade, as a teacher of English as a second language in several sites around the globe the author began to feel more and more like a thief. He drifted into the teaching of English literature and language because he had a degree in existential philosophy and New Zealand had no openings for such a trade. The process of countering does not and should not avoid the English language completely, most obviously in today's boundary-disintegrating world.