"Hey, Vito," he says, "Dere's bad guys in da neighborhood. You need protection."
"Yeah?" Vito asks. "I didn't know. Who? Where dey hangin' out?"
"Oh, you know, your brother-in-law Vinnie at the flower shop down on Canal."
"Why dat dirty ... yeah, I'm not surprised. Ever since dat day in --"
Capone holds up his hand. "Say no more. Dat Vinnie, he don't think so good. Anyways, twenty bucks a month, first uh-duh-month. We'll keep Vinnie off uh yuhs."
"Thanks, Alphonse."
And of course the story ends with Capone driving over to Vinnie's flower shop and running the same racket on him about Vito.
For 95+% of us, this whole mess started with being dragged into an unwilling engagement with a ritualistic system we couldn't have hoped to understand until it was too late. Everywhere we looked there were symbols of authority: Flags, judges in robes, guys and ladies in $800 suits, buttressed by people with guns ... all there to examine the most intimate aspects of our lives as though there was any possibility they could come to any certain conclusions ...
We didn't like it, and our opponent was our soon-to-be ex- spouse. And so it was predictable that we'd not penetrate the surface of things but instead buy into the presentation of the issue as given to us by the system and we'd treat our soon-to-be-ex- as our opponent. And sure enough, the self-fulfilling prophecy was fulfilled.
It should set alarm bells ringing that in no other area of law do so many otherwise level-headed people behave as the functional equivalents of serious neurotics. They aren't neurotics. Nor are we. The system took our kids hostage and we acted predictably.
This will all straighten out as soon as the victims realize how impotent our true opponents are in the face of principled, determined, unselfish opposition that's united around 3 or 4 points about which nearly everyone agrees. The first of those points is, "It's bad law that hurt us ... not our former spouses."
Vito and Vinnie need to realize that Capone's nothing but a middle man profiteering off of fear. And since there's no one but Vito and Vinnie to profit from ... the real enemy is Alphonse. It's all simple after that. Maybe not easy. But simple.