Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Fences

With palms together,
Good Morning All,

Ever since I was a little kid I wondered how borders existed. I often looked at maps of the world, scouring the continents looking at the lines separating one country from another and wondering what they looked like on the ground. As a kid I thought maybe there were actual lines and that it must be some body's job to go around painting them, like they do on roads. As an adult I still wonder about these lines dividing us as a species. I wonder about how these divisions divide us rather than bring us together. I wonder about the fear that is created through groupings, the discrimination that develops, and often think about the world as a place without boundary as a place without limits.

When we drop our boundaries, in one sense, we create possibilities for expansion. Companies know this. International corporations see boundaries as impediments and actively work within them to make them non-existent. Would it not be wise to eventually find a way to live on this planet as if we are all part of the same family of man?

Creating fences, putting armed soldiers along our borders, seems unwise to me. It creates a police state of sorts, and further divides us. True security, it seems to me, comes with friendship and intermarriage, where all people see themselves as family.

Threats to the family will always exist, well at least as long as there are both vast differences between haves and have-nots and as long as groups of people suffer and die while others live and thrive.Increasing the height of the fence will not stop that.

Be well.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

As a very young man, I spent several summers making the borders on the maps. At a drafting table in a private civil engineering firm, drawing the black ink lines on clear acetate that would form the blueprints later.

But more than that, hours in the hot, dusty southern Indiana sun shooting the elevations, measuring the lines; hour after hour. Walking the heated country asphalt and dry, grassy pastures; stepping out the lines in measure that others would see...only as lines on paper.

Good practice.

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