That is within the target ring, StevieG! Over to you...
They [the guttergangs] did not suddenly discover patriotism, of course. They did not put aside their clenched internecine attack on all social structures outside their own for the sake of humanity's greater good. Nevertheless they were human beings--genophobic to the core. Like patriots and religionists, environmentalists and native Earthers, nations and corporations, politicians and cops, they could not stifle the visceral frisson of their revulsion against imperialism by mutation.
By degrees too small to be measured, too small even to be noticed in the short term, the guttergangs began to erode.
This process took any number of forms. As one crude example: thanks to the Amnion, the appetite of the UMCP for young bodies was as intense as, and inherently more comfortable than, the guttergangs'. Active recruitment by the police gave the hungry youth of Earth a choice distinct from the more passive, as well as more brutal, accretion of the guttergangs.
Or a more subtle instance: hating and fearing the Amnion, the ordinary people of Earth--the natural prey of the guttergangs--had less hatred and fear to spare for those gangs. Therefore in complex, almost indefinable ways the guttergangs began to lose their mystique, their attraction for the lost and disenfranchised of the planet. In comparison to the Amnion, the gangs were perceived as more bearable, more manageable, more normal; therefore less threatening to humankind--and less appealing to humankind's downtrodden. Over time, no human enterprise could oppose--or remain unchanged by--this kind of perceptual shift.
Slowly across the decades, genophobia united humanity against its common foe.
All due credit to Cord Hurn's dissection of
A Dark and Hungry God Arises, Chapter 33 - Ancillary Documentation / Guttergangs (almost exactly two years ago) for the inspiration for this question, as well as the extensive quotes-from-original-text.
Love prevails.
~ Tracie Mckinney-Hammon
Change is not a process for the impatient.
~ Barbara Reinhold
Courage!
~ Dan Rather