The Us and Them Theory

If you think about it, it's just human nature to divide people into two groups, "us" and "them".  It probably starts out when we are kids, with "us" being the other kids and "them" being the adults.  Then, when we go to school, the kids are still "us", but now the teachers and administrators are "them".  There are other distinctions based on race, religion, and nationality, which kind of confuses the issue.  In the movies, there were the good guys and the bad guys.  I always identified with the good guys, but some of the other kids identified with the bad guys, and I'm not sure why.  I mean, who in their right mind would want to be a bad guy when they could just as easily be a good guy?
One of the reasons I joined the army was so I could do my part to oppose the bad guys of the day, which were, of course, the Commies.  Before that it had been the NAZIs, but they were all gone by the time I arrived on the scene, and I assumed it would only be a matter of time before we would overthrow the Commies just like our predecessors overthrew the NAZIs.  The next generation would likely have a new crop of bad guys to oppose, but I didn't know at the time that it would be the Islamic terrorists.

Something happened while I was in the army that put the whole Us and Them Theory into a new perspective.  One night, while in the midst of an alcohol enhanced philosophical discussion with my fellow soldiers, I had sort of an epiphany.  I drew a circle on a piece of paper and bisected it with a vertical line.  The circle represented Berlin, with the right half being East Berlin and the left half being West Berlin.  Then I drew a horizontal line bisecting the same circle, with the bottom two quadrants representing "us" and the top two quadrants representing "them".  I then proposed the hypothesis that the guys in the top two quadrants were the real bad guys and the the guys in the bottom two quadrants were the real good guys.  Years later I heard of an historical event which happened during World War I that supported my hypothesis but, at the time, I genuinely believed it to be an original idea.  My colleagues sagely agreed with me, but then one of them came up with the disturbing corollary that "We, to them, are them".  We agreed to table that issue for a future discussion, due to the lateness of the hour and the degree of our alcohol enhanced fatigue, but I don't remember us ever getting back to it.

Here's a link to the aforementioned historical event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce

We didn't give all that money to Red China for free, we exchanged it for manufactured goods, made with cheap labor, with which they flooded our markets, undermining our own industrial base in the process.  Our allies, Japan and Taiwan, had been selling us cheap manufactured goods for years with no apparent ill effects but, when Red China did it, everything went to hell in a hand basket.  Coincidence? I think not!