Last week, Awix reviewed a movie. I wasn't getting any of the references – I'd never heard of any of these people and didn't even know who they were supposed to be. I had to fact-check it when he said the main character was played by a CGI chimpanzee – true, of course, but it made me snort coffee. Anyway, I looked the singer up and listened to 45 seconds of a song and said, 'Oh, okay,' and went on with my day. I didn't have the urge to cancel anybody.

Later, I stumbled across a Youtube video in which a fellow was explaining why Robbie Williams wasn't well-known in the US. Reason One was that he was 'terminally British.' Reason Two was that he couldn't be bothered to develop a following in the US. I never learned what Reason Three was because he started waving his hands excitedly and snorting nerdishly, and I realised from the counter that he was planning to do this for eight more minutes, so I bailed.

Today I read a thought-provoking article about how in the US, university enrollments are declining. That's not happy news. I used to teach at a four-year institution, among others, and my guess was going to be that the rising costs were making higher education unaffordable again. This is something that infuriates me but I can't do anything about. Actually, though, the author of the article was pointing out statistical studies that seem to indicate that one problem is the declining percentage of male students. It seems that female students outnumber male students 3:2 these days.

According to the writer, when women take over a field or profession or area of human endeavour, the men get disgusted and leave, subsequently devaluing that area. She calls it 'male flight.' My first reaction to this was shock. My second, after seeing her statistical analysis and reading the comments by men who are uncomfortable with female-run corporate structures, was that I saw everybody's point. Nonetheless, I feel that this may be a peculiarly American problem and that our attitudes may need serious adjustment.

I come from a long line of men and women who worked well together. After a moment's thought, I figured out why: they lived on subsistence farms in the mountains and, well, worked together. There was no question of an environment created by any particular outlook. Even at church, they shared responsibilities and worked out their strategies accordingly. Yes, there were spheres of activity usually set aside for men and women, but there were exceptions for almost all of them. Women could hunt and shoot; men could cook and crochet if they wanted to. The government said only men could go in the army, and nature said you had to have a certain physiology to give birth, but other than that, people did what they wanted to.

North America tends to be the testing ground these days for all the truly dumb ideas. I wish we could break the cycle. For as long as I can remember, Europe has suffered from inheriting these bad ideas after the US has already tested them out and made a mess of things. I just wish the good folk of Europe could benefit from the mistakes over here.

What we're doing these days is basically anything that can divide people into opposing groups. This ethnic group against that one. Men against women. Churchgoers against heathens. Politically. Geographically. Sexually. This is ridiculous and also counterproductive.

Wherever did people get this cookie-cutter thinking? Here are a few of my thoughts on the history of 'divide and conquer' when it comes to US demographics. Your values may differ.

Back in the mid-1800s, most Americans lived on farms, just as they had in 1790, when the first census was taken. But a shift took place, starting in the 1800s. Massive waves of immigration brought refugees from all over Europe to the cities, not the country. Instead of filtering out in search of farmland, the newcomers got absorbed into the growing factory systems of burgeoning industries. Cities created crowded subcultures, distinct from the small towns and farming communities of the rest of the continent.

In the meantime, farmers were feeling pressure to compete with agribusiness – and the competition was grossly unfair. Banks were sitting tight on the money, leaving the farmers cash-poor and having to borrow against next year's crop. Railroads squeezed the life out of the farmer, who had to pay to ship produce to market. Farmers grew more and more in order to pay for their new equipment. And so it went. Young people who grew up on farms got tired of the endless work and poor prospects – particularly since their families were often so large that they stood no chance of inheriting even a piece of land to start their own farms with. They headed for the cities, where they could at least get paid wages.

Cities got even more crowded when the Great Migration took place after 1910. African Americans got tired of the prejudice and poor prospects in the southeast US and headed north and west for the cities, jobs with good wages, and better social conditions. With all these groups swelling the cities, eventually the rural farm communities – once the default setting for American life – became the minority lifestyle.

Things got even worse after World War II: the highway system gave birth to the suburbs. 'Planned' communities. Segregated, of course, by race, ethnic affiliation, even religion. Full of quarter-acre lots and conformity, short on atmosphere. Requiring at least one car per household because nobody's home was within walking distance of a carton of milk. A far cry from the crowded neighbourhoods of Brooklyn or Chicago and exactly what every social-climbing citizen was told to want.

Suburbs divided men from women, kids from parents, and young families from grandparents. Different ethnic groups no longer rubbed shoulders in open-air markets: the 1950s' parking lots were full of nice cars that lined up in front of the supermarket so that the well-groomed local boys could drop the housewives' purchases in the capacious trunks. Husbands came home on the commuter train and kids from the local picture-perfect school, and everybody sat down to dinner with the same question on their lips: 'How was your day?'

People became strangers within their own families, and it showed. By the 1960s, those of us who had grown up in this weirdly unnecessary dystopia got very worried about, well, everybody, and started brainstorming for ideas. This was widely misinterpreted by the people in the suburbs as 'unrest' and 'protest' when in fact it was mostly an attempt at making everybody happier. By and large, though, what we were trying to do back then could be summed up in the song lyric that exhorted people to 'love one another right now.'

This 'my group is better than your group, and also more picked-on' is the absolute opposite of that. And it needs to get gone.

The 'divide and conquer' strategy only makes scam artists and rich monopolists happy. And then only for a little while. Once you set people at each other's throats like that, it's only a matter of time before nothing works at all. Men won't go to college because they don't want to work with women. The quality of everything declines because improvements require a variety of styles and approaches. Creativity suffers. Everybody ends up frustrated and grumpy.

You don't believe me? Take a look at your newsfeed this week. A certain political party has made big gains: are they getting what they said they wanted? Or are they squabbling among themselves? The US continues to have incidents of domestic terrorism instigated, not by left-wing radicals, but by men who voted for the incoming president and the party (allegedly) in control. Nobody's sure what they want. We're pretty sure they aren't sure, either.

So, as another year of confusion begins, may I timidly suggest that maybe, just maybe, we weren't being fatuous when we asked everybody to 'love one another right now'?

Go safely, friends.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

13.01.25 Front Page

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