Us vs. Them

Time to write about this because it's been spinning around my head a lot more lately. Of course, this is something I've been thinking about for a very long time and as this decade comes to a close, it's been a defining part of it. Why do we as a people or society have to be divided? I know there's always two sides to every coin: dark and light, good and evil, but 'black and white' has become much more defined as of late. There can be no middle ground, you're either with 'us' or with 'them'. It's almost as if we've all forgotten all the similarities between us in favor of the differences. We all will die one day. None of us truly knows what happens after we die (though we have heaven and hell which is kind of like us vs. them for the afterlife). The problem becomes even worse when one side becomes more powerful than the other and takes over the discussion. For conservatives and Republicans, this has been easy since they tend to agree with each other more and yell louder about their issues. For liberals and Democrats they try to listen to more sides of the issue but this causes more division and less cohesiveness which wouldn't be a problem accept that they are forced to compete with Republicans. What Republicans have done successfully is make the word 'liberal' seem like a bad thing, when it's just the opposite of them. How do you define light without dark or conservative without liberal? The media loves this division and instead of reporting the news like they used to, they place everything on these sides for us to battle over so they can have more interesting stories to report. For the rich, the division helps everyone keep their focus on each other and never at them. Lincoln himself said something along the lines of 'a house divided cannot stand' during a time when this country faced it's worst division ever, the Civil War. It almost seems like the media, the rich, the powerful would 'want' to see some sort of social war occur, though I'm not sure what they would really benefit from it in the end apart from a bunch of us killing each other off, removing competition, and one hell of a story. Just writing about this shows how I feel about 'them' and how easy it is to slip into a certain side. I've been thinking a lot about how a message could be sent out to everyone saying not to listen to the media, and in turn the rich corporations, but look around them at what they see day to day, see what happens around them, and don't immediately believe what they hear from a source that's not someone they already know. I truly hope that this starts to happen more as this new decade begins. Is that too much to ask?