The Violence of Borders
Isn’t it silly to celebrate the anniversary of imaginary lines on maps? Do you celebrate barriers? Do you celebrate a wall or a border?
Why?
Is it because you are scared and the lines reassure you? Do they provide you with protection, with security? Do they make you feel like you are part of something?
Are you not already part of something by being human?
One usually thinks of violence as a physical act. To restrain somebody, to beat someone, to rob a person, to shoot a person. These are obviously violent acts. But isn’t there also violence in one’s thoughts?
Isn’t thinking of yourself as ‘Brazilian’ or ‘British’, being violent?
By assigning youself a label are you not separating yourself from the rest of humanity? Are you not making a division, which breeds antagonism, which results in violence? If you are proud of ‘your country’, if you are ‘patriotic’, are you not also directly responsible for the strife in the world?
What I admire most about this human invention called the internet is how easily it allows humans to cross the imaginary borders they set up in the world. The internet is a mirror of the borderless reality which humans can look into. (Nevertheless, your own thoughts and how you choose to look into this mirror affects what you see, as with any mirror.)
Recently I have noticed attempts to define and force borders in the internet, much like those lines and shaded areas on political maps. Region-specific content and information delivered based on the geographical location of the person accessing it can be useful, but not when it is used to create barriers and to make false walls based on the already fictitious borders of the world.
Attempts to wall and divide the internet will, as with artificial borders in the world, be unsuccessful. The internet knows no borders, because they are not real.
I have a friend who lives in a house which is in a walled area, part of a ‘compound’, with guards at the gate. When he went traveling with his family his house was broken into and many things were stolen. Several other houses in the same compound have also been burgled. Suspicion has fallen upon the guards, who can inform burglars when the people who live in a house are away. There were meetings, and a group of ‘gypsies’ who also live in a house in the compound was assigned potential blame; or maybe the burglars were the immigrants. The discussions in the meetings probably involved the building of higher walls, the installation of cameras, different guards, maybe armed.
The situation is familiar to me, as my house was also burgled many years ago. My house was also in a closed compound, my father had bought a gun on advice of others, though thankfully he was away working in the office when they came. My mother was at home with Seu Vitor, our gardner. The people that came threatened to cut off her fingers, to kill her. They were looking for the gun and for the other things behind the walls. I am glad my mother is brave, strong. No physical violence happened to her or to Seu Vitor apart from being tied and locked in a room. The burglars only took physical things, but did leave emotional scars.
It occurred to me that my and my friend’s experiences are the experiences of the world reduced to a smaller scale. Walls are built to separate and divide those inside from those outside, for security, for protection, for entitlement. The houses inside are large. The neighbours probably don’t see or talk to each other much, and much less to those outside the walls. They likely don’t know each other at all, only rarely going outside in person rather than in their automobile (another type of border).
Do the walls and guards around them protect them? Don’t they in fact make them more vulnerable? Do the walls not divide them and separate them from those outside? Do the walls not antagonise? Doesn’t violence, whether in physical form or in the form of thought, only breed more violence?
How can we be free of these imaginary borders, of these fabricated walls, of divisions, of violence?
Shouldn’t these walls and borders, which are not real, be rejected? Isn’t giving them validity an act of division, an act of violence?
The moment you renounce your support of a flag or country, of an organized religion (which is others telling you what and how to think), of any cause; the moment you renounce what others tell you and decide to not accept any labels; the moment you decide to think for yourself, will you not then be free, and no longer a contributor to the violence in the world?
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