Divide and conquer: two perspectives

Choose the one that helps the world

It’s the Chicago way. That, and bringing a gun to a knife fight.

I always assumed that “divide and conquer” meant “getting more done by dividing the work among us”. This seemed so nice and positive: by working together with each person playing to their strengths, groups of people could accomplish huge things!

Of course, the original sense of the term is from the Latin, divide et impera, which the Internet says is attributed to Julius Caesar but was not in widespread use until the 1600s. It describes the military strategy of getting the enemy to form quarrelling factions so that it is easier to beat them. I don’t like that sense of the term.

I have strong political opinions, but I try to keep them out of this newsletter because there are already a lot of people covering politics and because not every opinion needs to be shared with the world. But so far in 2025, we’ve had a truckload of political upheaval that has put most of us a little off kilter. I have been talking to people with organizational experience from a range of political persuasions, as well as watching the state of things, and I am going to make three suggestions of ways that we can divide and conquer the good way, to make our communities and country a little better.

1. Build community: The best way to avoid the bad form of dividing and conquering is to find other people and work on the good form. If you don’t have a community, start small: become a regular at your local library branch or a locally owned coffee shop. If you do have a community, nurture it. Check in with people you haven’t seen in a while. Answer your email (surely I’m not the only one who is horribly behind.) Go to meetings and events. Take the time to have fun with people you love.

2. Support food banks and food pantries: The federal government has laid off a lot of people, cut contracts, and may be delaying Social Security payments soon. Between the cuts and ripple effects in smaller communities, some people will have trouble buying groceries. Food banks (large warehouses that collect food donated from manufacturers and purchased in volume from wholesalers) and food pantries (local organizations, often churches and community centers, that distribute food to people in need) will need assistance to meet the demand. If you have money to spare, donate it. If you don’t have money to spare, donate your time. After all, food banks and pantries will need people to help sort, pack, and hand out food. Most make it easy to volunteer. And if you need extra groceries this month, there’s no shame. That’s why these organizations exist, and you can pay it forward when you can.

3. Donate to No One Left Behind: I get it, there’s a lot of room for people of goodwill to disagree on immigration and refugee policies, and on how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were conducted and ended. But I think we all can agree that people who worked for our defense department and our state department during these wars deserve our gratitude and protection. No One Left Behind was founded by a group of U.S. military veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan who want to resettle those Iraqis and Afghans who worked with them as translators, fixers, and assistants. Their lives are literally in danger if they stay where they are, and the U.S. government helped resettle them until last month. I know people who have worked with No One Left Behind, and people who work in refugee settlement, who think very highly of their work.

Do you have any suggestions for other things that people of goodwill can do right now to divide and conquer (in the good sense?)