James Rohrer: A Simple Recipe for "Us vs Them"

My Uncle Richard did not need to die prematurely. He was a victim of the most relentless killer the world has ever known: Us and Them. This assassin can slay victims in countless ways. In my uncle's case, it looked like either a stroke or medical malpractice, but it really was US and Them. Richard had left our Appalachian family farm at the tag end of the Great Depression. He moved to a big city in New York, got a job with a rising company, and soon he became management. He made a bundle, joined a country club, had a good life, but got burned out. When I was about ten years old, he decided to take early retirement and move back to the farm. He wanted out of the city, out of the rat race, and back to nature. Soon after he returned, he went to our local small town doctor for a physical exam. He felt fine, but the doctor told him that he needed immediately to stop taking a medication that his family physician in New York had prescribed. Uncle Richard derisively ignored the advice. His New York doctor was an old friend, a member of the country club, while the small town doctor was a refugee from the Soviet Union. This was during the Cold War, when most Americans imagined that nothing in the Soviet Union could possibly be up to American standards, and certainly not medical training. The last time I ever saw my Uncle, he was fuming about the "damned Russkie." "Can you imagine the nerve of that damned Russkie, thinking he knows more than my doctor?" Two weeks later, Uncle Richard was dead. The coroner's report made it clear: He should have listened to the Russkie. My uncle was not particularly stubborn or foolish. He was just being human. We humans are by nature social creatures, even the most introverted of us, and we tend to trust and follow the thinking of the groups with which we identify.