Crossing the Rubicon

When we were kids, our family had a matched set of drinking glasses with different cartoons on them. They were famous cartoons, drawn by some famous guy whose name I don't remember, but I think the series was called "The Nebishes". Anyway, one of those drawings was a picture of two guys sitting opposite each other with a table between them. Both guys were leaned back in their chairs, staring at the ceiling, with their feet on the table, which was piled high with a mess of papers and stuff. The caption said, "Next week we've got to get organized." 

I think that may be why poor people have such a hard time of it, they're just not organized. There are Black organizations, Hispanic organizations, Indian organizations, and lots of different White organizations, but there is no big umbrella organization that includes all the poor people together. Although I'm kind of a loner myself, I do believe there is value in bringing people together for a common purpose, as long as they're all in it for the same reason. For an organization to be effective, it needs to have a common agenda that is supported by all it's members. They can have their own private agendas too, as long as everybody agrees that the common agenda takes priority.

During World War II, it was government policy to encourage people to forget their differences and think of themselves as all Americans. After the war, this policy seemed to gradually morph into something different. It seemed like they were trying to drive wedges between the various ethnic groups and turn them against each other. I suspect that they did this on purpose, but I can't prove it. Nobody can argue that these groups hadn't been persecuted and marginalized in the past, and that it wasn't high time to make them all equal under the law, but then it seemed like they went beyond equal. Maybe they didn't really go beyond equal, but it looked like that to a lot of people, and I think the Establishment encouraged that perception.

During the times of the Roman Republic, it was customary for armies returning from a campaign to disband before entering the city. The traditional disbanding ground was on the other side of the Rubicon River. When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his army intact, it made some people so nervous that they launched a plot to assassinate him. "Crossing the Rubicon" has since come to mean "passing the point of no return" but, in its original context, it meant staying organized when it was no longer necessary to do so, making some people nervous in the process. Well, I think that the Establishment didn't want people crossing the Rubicon after the war. They had done such a good job of getting people to pull together together that they were worried about what people might do next if they ever realized the power that such an effective organization can exert, so they took another idea from Julius Caesar: "Divide and Conquer".