Op-Ed: “Us and them” is obsolete
By Winslow Myers
Competitiveness is one of our primary values. Competition runs the world. It orients success in business, or sports—and above all in war. Adversaries seek the transient glory of military advantage. Yet none of our four biggest challenges, the climate emergency, nuclear weapons, the rise of AI, and global pandemics are “us and them” problems. They are “us” problems. This may seem more obvious with climate change and disease, but it is just as true for AI and nukes, especially in some fatal combination of AI and nukes under theoretical consideration by the masters of war. The ruins of Gaza show us that even conventional wars can approach a nuclear level of destruction.
As AI gets further integrated with modern weaponry, it will turn into an “us” problem. Revenge, advantage-seeking, and tit-for-tat among “us and them” is fueling an ever-accelerating arms race toward a no-exit level of destruction. To use AI only to help “us” overcome “them” will prove futile—there will be ever-shifting moments of temporary technological advantage such as we are seeing in the standoff in Ukraine. But not only will no one win definitively, everyone may lose. AI will be a saving grace only to the extent of what it could do for all of “us.”
If we cannot forgive, let alone love, our enemies, we can at least acknowledge the futility of the competitive cycles of violence to which we are addicted. While it is understandable that collective trauma might make the following thought experiment impossible for most Israelis, imagine that the response to the October 7 pogrom shifted 180 degrees—that Israel had been honest about how hard its leaders have worked to make sure they would never have legitimate partners on the Palestinian side. That the sickeningly labeled strategy of “mowing the grass” may even have been one of the causes of the brutal Hamas attack.
Imagine that Israel, knowing from bitter experience what it means to be the victim of dehumanization and genocide, refused to make similar victims of the Palestinians either in Gaza or the West Bank. Imagine that the resources expended by the IDF, billions of dollars, setting aside the lives of far too many on both sides, had flowed directly into the establishment of an Israeli-initiated Palestinian state with safe borders, equality under the law, subsidized land and housing and a working economy, taking the wind out of the sails of the hate-driven proxies of Iran like Hezbollah.
What is true for any intractable quarrel on our small planet is just as true for all the others. Peacebuilding has a chance when people recognize their own role in the conflict. We venerate Nelson Mandela because he sought reconciliation rather than victory. Just as Netanyahu might look into the face of the late Hamas leader Yahyah Sinwar and see his own ruthlessness, so could Secretary Hegseth look at his counterpart in the Iran Revolutionary Guards and see a fanaticism resembling his own. The face of “them” is a mirror.
The feckless unnecessary war with Iran will presumably only end with some version of the very treaty that the Trump-detested Obama had already painstakingly solidified, along with a return to the status quo ante of free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, where the U.S. and Iran are trying absurdly to outblockade each other. In the climactic scene in “The Bridge Over the River Kwai,” a medical officer, after caring for his British fellow-prisoners while they spend months painstakingly building a railroad bridge, has to witness the bridge being blown up—by British commandos. “Madness! Madness!” he exclaims.
The astronauts who have viewed the whole Earth from space almost all report a transformation in their thinking, a sense that their home is no longer their nation of origin, but the planet. War is a bomb-cratered, blood-spattered, child-screaming distraction from the shift toward which the Earth-inclusive spirit of the astronauts urgently points.
In another thought experiment that seems far easier than Israelis reconciling with their many adversaries, imagine an alien attack upon Earth. How quickly would our local “us and them” disputes transform into a single “us” against the aliens. But we have been invaded by forces that have an equal capacity to unite us—the scourge of weapons of mass destruction and the threat of rising global temperatures. Our opportunity is a paradigm shift from “us and them” to “us” working together to solve challenges no nation can solve alone.
Winslow Myers, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a retired teacher and the co-author with Libby Traubman of One: One Humanity, One Earth, One Future.