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War doesn’t just happen, whether it’s in Iraq or within the confines of the family. Divide and conquer doesn’t just happen, it’s made to happen. When a parent plays one child against the other, it sets the scene for competition, not cooperation.

“Too bad that you can’t be as smart as your brother,” says a father to his son.

“You do the dishes, not your sister. She’s too pretty to do dishes,” a mother barks at her daughter. Scenes like these are played out in thousands of homes. Hate must be nurtured. It doesn’t grow on its own.

The mother who wants to keep her children divided because she believes, perhaps unconsciously, that if her children love each other, they can’t love her.

The father who sets up a competition between his children believing this will motivate them to do better.

They are setting the scene for family battles later on. Business sections of newspapers are filled with sibling rivalries set up in early childhood. These are the children who inherit fortunes and will fight with their siblings to the death of the business over the division of the estate.

The family scene is a microcosm of a bigger picture. If we take a realistic look at the politics being played out in our country for the past 40 years, we can see the same situation. The politicos pit one group against another for years. They use race, money, religion, and cultural differences as they forge walls of hate between the populations.

Their motives are simple. They use this divisiveness to remain in power. Make no mistake about it: politicians are very clever about dividing and conquering. Anyone who has taken Political Science 101 should know how we’re all being played. Unfortunately, too many colleges are not teaching students to think independently, but are just indoctrinating them to hate rather than to be rational adults.

We are not a homogeneous country like Japan or Finland or Sweden. Our diversity is both our strength and our weakness. A homogeneous population has a much easier time of playing by accepted rules than a widely diversified culture, where everyone wants to do their own thing. Individuality is great until it rocks the boat and starts drowning others.

Here our politicians separate people by making believe that the culture of their birth is not to be traded into becoming an American. These are the people who have come to our shores to escape the very culture we attach to them. If all cultures are equal and sacred, why would so many risk their lives to come to our shores? Encouraging immigrants to hang on to their past is no way to create a strong America. People’s allegiances are not directed, as they once were, to become Americans.

Theodore Roosevelt said it all in 1915: “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities. …There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American … those Americans who terrorize American politicians by threats of the foreign vote are engaged in treason to the American Republic.”

Reach Barbara Bova at babovacolumn@aol.com