Sunday, March 8, 2009

Does borders feed fear and breed war?

You see them everywhere, borders.
They come in all shapes and purposes, but have one thing in common no matter where you
find them - to define us and them, what's yours and what's not.

To devide the world with pencilsharp lines, is to limit the mind and the body. There are
no such lines, they don't exist. We can build all the walls we may desire, there will be
no line between us. Nothing but air to unifi us in all time, for as long as we will exist.

Dividing power while sitting around a table, these politicians have through history
defined the world in their weird minds and forced the population to accept the side they
happen to live on. Families separated for years, sometimes generations. As it is not a natural
state of the human mind, there has taken much violence to keep these borders real on the planet.
Much blood, too.

Curiosity has turned in to suspicion, as friends turned in to enemies.

But what are borders? What good do they do? Do they make you feel safer? Does the us-and-them
mentality work on you? Do you buy their speeches about enemies and safety?
Or does borders feed fear and breed war?
In modern time, no country is isolated, no market of trade just local.
We interact in many ways and I dare to say that everybody (except the really recluse
loners and tribes) knows people from almost every continent. Most people understand more
than one language.
It is natural to explore and travel. To see new places is a right we take for granted. We feed
our soul and our mental healthiness with new impressions and views of life. We understand
culture and climate, we take part in global ideas and thrive here on the Internet, where
we really don't have a passport to define us. Your nationality fades in to a formal detail,
your mother-tongue becomes irrelevant. We are all the same, even more so than in reality.
We are showered with photos from all corners of the globe and one thing I never see are borders.
As the people are internationalized, why not the political way of acting too?

What ever good borders might once have brought, I don't see a real use for them anymore. They
bring grief and violence, which we have enough of anyway. There is no us-and-them. It doesn't exist!
Borders split ideas and divide greatness in to confusion.
We can try and justify borders by sitting on our lazy butts and say how much we do together these
days, but that's really just because we were born blindfolded. Nations are a joke, there's nothing
natural about it.
But if we keep evolving our tribes on Earth as we have been so far, I have every reason to be
positive. We formed small tribes and then villages, that became groups of villages as pacts of
trade and peace came about. Roads shaped the look of the lands and soon we had metropolitan
cities. Power-hungry rulers wanted more, and war became a frequent fact of politics. Show me
yours and I'll show you mine. Soon they all lost too many men in their armies and they had to
figure a way to live side by side. Voila! The pencil sharp lines where born.
But as we grow both in experience and in dreams, we have steadily become more interactive,
more understanding and more of our natural curiosity comes to the surface. So if we keep
evolving, we will soon be too great to be kept inside politicians borders.





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