It seems that you can’t swing members of the greek system around these days without them hitting someone or some group involved in a stupid, unproductive feud.

Given the choice, I’d much rather people put aside their differences and work together toward a common goal than not.

I think most would agree. So why aren’t things like that? What stimulus will get people to act in such a manner?

My most vivid experience of general social cooperation was probably during “Operation Desert Shield” when I was in sixth grade.

I remember that people tied ribbons on trees, flew flags, held parades, discriminated against people from the Middle East and generally acted in a patriotic manner.

The reason for all that, now that I think about it, was that the Bush administration realized the extent to which the government could work with the media to control public opinion during a time of conflict.

Through a massive and brilliantly orchestrated P.R. blitzkrieg involving the demonization of Saddam Hussein, the dehumanization of the Iraqis and nightly displays of our superior military technology on the evening news, the American public was almost absolutely in support of a war fought to benefit American oil companies.

Now that I look back on it, it was really something.

After I pondered these observations for a while, I felt more strongly than ever that America should engage in armed conflict with a militarily inferior nation whenever things started getting bad at home.

It’d be for the best. But then I thought about the nation we happened to fight. Couldn’t we create international unity as well as national?

Then I saw the movie “Independence Day.” That really made things fall into place. What better a common goal could we as a nation, hell, as a world have than the threat of annihilation from an alien race?

There’s a universal danger, the fear of the unknown, the presence of violence, the development of sweet new phallic weaponry that would look great on T.V. and an enemy that doesn’t even need to be dehumanized because it’s already inhuman. It’d be sweet.

There aren’t any alien immigrants on Earth, so we wouldn’t need to build machine-gun-lined internment camps for alien-Americans or anything. It’d only bring us together.

We’d have Jerry Falwell and the gay purple Teletubby making joint appearances on Larry King, both speaking in their strange incomprehensible way about how we need unity to fight the evil presence.

Pat Buchanan could talk constantly about how much he hates aliens, and no one would disagree. It brings a lump to my throat just thinking about it.

So now all we have to do is figure out some of the logistics. It’d be too hard to actually have the aliens come down to earth to fight.

One of them would probably be captured by some sort of citizen militia from Montana, and then we’d all know that we were fighting a bunch of midgets wearing latex.

But the way we fight these days doesn’t involve any actual contact with the enemy anyhow.

All we’d really need are some telegenic images of spaceships and complicated military jargon to fill the evening news and keep the public informed and enthusiastic.

That’s where George Lucas will come in.

He’ll have to remember to make the aliens ugly. We definitely don’t need our mortal enemies to look like a bunch of puppies.

We’d also need to come up with a catchy derogatory name for the aliens. Maybe we could use ET, as in “man, there’s nothing I hate more than those damn ET’s and those damn ET lovers.”

People all over the earth would stage demonstrations in which they’d smash copies of the Spielberg movie to show their support for the war.

Spielberg himself will probably be blacklisted for having ET sympathies, but that’s the price you have to pay. Or he’ll have to pay. Semantics, really.

Really then, our long-term social goals need to be re-evaluated.

I know now that we shouldn’t try to build a world order based on tolerance and understanding; there’s just too much distrust and tribal mentality in human nature.

We can’t function at our best unless we have an enemy.

The best thing our leaders can do for us is to create an external entity that we can focus all of this belligerence on, so that we will have none of it left for each other.

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Elton Wong is a sophomore in biology from Ames.