I met Barbara Kane Lewis of Broome County, New York (near Binghamton) in 2018. Before she passed away in 2020, she left me with a gift: one of the clearest accounts I’ve ever heard of how a community gets divided. With her permission, I want to share that gift with you.
Barbara’s story, edited here for length and clarity, is about a gas company that came into a handful of small towns in Broome County about 10 or 15 years ago. Their goal was to take people’s land to frack. To do it, they got to work trying to rip those communities apart.
I was part of a group that was meeting at the library at the Broome County Library. It was to teach people about fracking. I had attended a number of meetings that were run by frackers. They began a very strong campaign trying to get people to believe that fracking was good for them.
We quickly found out that it wasn't. We visited fracking sites in Pennsylvania and it was not good. People's land was being torn up. The land was getting wrecked really fast. People were left with literally no place to live. I mean, it was, it was really dangerous.
We could see this. So we began to try to educate people that this was not the way that it appeared. The frackers were coming in and telling us how wonderful it was going to be, how much money we were going to make, how we were all gonna be rich. The company was trying to show that this was a golden opportunity for people.
And people were beginning to buy this because it was definitely a low income area. Their families had lived there for generations, and they really didn't want their families to move. People have lived in that area for generations and wanted to maintain their life together. They wanted to keep their families intact.
We began an education campaign. The gas company did not care for us doing this. They started coming to our meetings. Did they come openly? No. They were coming in undercover. They were looking at ways they could, kind of, infiltrate.
They started doing things that you won't think are valuable, but they were. They were silly things, but they weren't actually silly. Like, if you were in the right group, you got coffee. And if you were the wrong group, you didn't. If you were in the right group, you got hats or T-shirts or sweatshirts or things like that. And if you were in the wrong group, you didn't.
They started giving barbecues. You could only go if you were on one side. They started all kinds of different things. You were not allowed to join into these unless you actually were part of the group. You had to be invited.
They were able to grab a lot of people with false information. The first technique they tried was to set people against “the rich people” — “don't believe those rich college people.” See there's always been a bit of a divide. People in the Binghamton area have always been a bit suspicious of the colleges. And they've been suspicious of Cornell [University, in nearby Ithaca]. Cornell and Ithaca activists just come storming in on their white horses, they're going to tell people what's what. The gas companies were quick to see that and to make the most of it. A college educated expert is not to be trusted. Oftentimes people felt as if they were not being thought of as a complete citizen, or their opinions were not being honored. They were receiving some special attention from the gas companies, who were putting these things on, that they might not have gotten otherwise.
And then every time we did any kind of an educational effort, they would counter it. When the film Gasland came out, they developed a counter film. They showed another movie at the same time. They actually had gold coins raining from the sky to try to show you that how wonderful it was to frack. I was not allowed into any of those things. There was a lot of screening going on.
They also sent people in as ringers, who would ask questions. We would have a speaker, say from Cornell, and they'd bring in people who are deliberately loud so that we would have to call the police because it was just too disruptive.
That's kind of their divide and conquer deal.
And then when we had the big meeting, which was aimed at trying to make people sign up, they went hardcore. It was a public service commission meeting. It was a completely different atmosphere that we had ever experienced before. I was amazed when I came around the corner and I saw the SWAT trucks there. A huge SWAT team. We had gone to many of these meetings before and we just thought this would be another one. But a holy cow, I showed up and here was the SWAT team separating us. It was an amazing, amazing thing.
Apparently they had convinced the police that we were dangerous. The police became very suspicious of us. So we were separated out from the group. We had to stay on one side. The other group had to stay on the other. This had said never happened before. We'd done testimony there before with, with none of this kind of issue. And suddenly they had us on either side and we couldn't cross the boundary. We had always been able to talk freely with one another. And they stopped us from doing that.
Suddenly we were divided. And then whenever we went anywhere, we were separated out. Never had this happened before. And of course we did not accept this. So we tried to still see the people that had become our friends. I mean we understood their points of view. They were farmers who wanted to keep their farms and were convinced that the only way to do that, to have the money do that, would be to let the pipelines go through.
We were trying to help them figure out how could they could still maintain their family farms. We wanted to help them if we could. They had become our friends. We thought we understood where they were coming from. But the police would not let us through. When we started going to [the state capitol in] Albany, they would literally put us on like one side of the building and the other side of the building.
The people on the “other side” didn’t like it either. We would sneak around and try to see each other because you know, we had developed relationships and we cared about one another and we didn’t want to be separated in that way. But the police really enforced it. And after that, we really didn't get to see them, in any public sphere, together.
Barbara’s story ended happily. After New York State banned fracking in 2015, she told me, the frackers left and the community started to heal.
For those (many) of us still working to overcome divides in our own communities — big and small — Barbara’s story offers at least three big lessons.
Lesson #1: Our neighbors are not the enemy.
Barbara and her group were committed environmental activists. They were tempted at every turn to turn against their neighbors who supported fracking. But they resisted. They got to know each other. They shared their stories.
They may never have agreed on the issue — pro-fracking vs. anti-fracking — but they realized these differences were shallow. Underneath, they all wanted to keep their homes, their farms, and their community intact. Those deeper shared values and interests provided the foundation to heal.
None of this was easy. Barbara talked about “how difficult it was to keep a united group going,” especially in the face of the frackers constantly poking and prodding and pushing people apart. But it made all the difference.
Lesson #2: The enemies are the dividers — the conflict entrepreneurs.
“The divisions,” Barbara made clear, “were imposed.” The people to fight are the people who impose the divisions, for their own benefit: the conflict entrepreneurs.
We often struggle to keep our eyes on that prize. We blame the undocumented immigrants for taking our jobs, instead of the bosses who hire them to undercut our wages. We blame the public sector workers for having better benefits than we do, instead of the private sector executives who deny us those same benefits. We blame our economic system on welfare cheats, rather than corporations on welfare.
It’s easy to see why. Our neighbors on the “other side” are right there in front of us, and the dividers tend to keep themselves well hidden. Out of sight is too often out of mind — unless we, like Barbara, keep them front and center.
Lesson #3: Learn the conflict entrepreneur’s playbook.
Maybe the most important lesson Barbara offers us is the step-by-step account of how the fracking companies tried to divide and conquer the community. Here it is, in brief:
How to Divide a Community — A Practical Guide for Conflict Entrepreneurs
Step One: Identify something people are scared to lose.
Make sure it’s something that really matters to them — their home, their job, their community, their values, their way of life.
Step Two: Convince them they’re in danger of losing it.
And here’s the fun part — they actually are in danger of losing it…because you’re the one trying to take it away from them!
Step Three: Blame someone else.
Make up an enemy outside the community (like, elitist academics), working in cahoots with an enemy inside the community (like, environmentalist neighbors).
Step Four: Show people you value them, and the “other side” doesn’t.
Give them free stuff. Invite them to “friends only” events. You know they’re good, decent, smart people. It’s those other people who think they’re bad or ignorant.
Step Five: Create your own set of facts.
Who are they going to believe? Their judgy neighbors, who think they’re dumb? Or you, who told them they’re smart and gave a free T-shirt?
Step Six: Escalate, using force if necessary.
Convince them their neighbors are a threat — and you are their only protector. To drive the point home, call in the cops.
One final note. Some people call this kind of divisive strategy “populism.” That’s dead wrong. It’s actually pseudo-populism — when an elite group (like a fracking company) pretends to speak for the people in order to exploit them. Real populism is when communities speak and act for themselves, and work together against the elite groups who try to exploit them.
Or as Barbara put it: “It's all of the members of that community saying, we want to maintain our own community. We are not going to succumb to another person's idea of what we should be.”
I told her that sounded like “true populism, meaning everybody in a community makes together and owns what they make. And that is what can overcome these huge imposed divisions that are dividing and conquering us.”
She said: “Exactly.”