Borders And My Soapbox

I’m going to stand on my soapbox for a moment now. It’s something my mother taught me. When you stand on top of something—like a soapbox—you feel more superior to those around you, it’s easier to gain people’s attention, to gain control of a situation, it offers a different view of your audience, and it’s arguably a better view—you can see everyone’s attentive or bored faces or you can choose to speak over the heads of everyone in the room while you stare at an exit sign.

I’ve been wandering a bit in both place and thought, and one constant is a feeling of restlessness. Perhaps it’s been the hotel hopping the last couple of weeks, I don’t know, but I pace the hotel rooms like a caged animal and I stroll along the streets of Sydney and its suburbs with no particular destination, just looking in this shop window, looking at this Italian restaurant’s menu, looking into this bar and considering a drink. I feel like a person without borders or confinement and the only thing that ever stops me from doing anything is a propensity for laziness and that ever-common fear of the unknown.

Borders themselves I’ve been pondering. I’m not sure why I never thought of it before, but they are silly. I’d use a harsher word if I were angrier; I’m really just baffled. So much of our lives is determined by these invisible but real geopolitical boundaries. It’s a wonder that the first time I looked at a satellite picture of Earth that I didn’t wonder why none of the countries were colored their respective color: pink for the former British Empire, green for France, burnt orange for Mexico, yellow for the USA. And if country borders aren’t silly enough, almost all of the nations that I’m aware of are divided into various states, provinces, territories, cantons. On a map of the 50 states, each is designated one of about five different colors—I remember Alaska was always green, Indiana always pink. And if these state boundaries aren’t silly enough, you have counties or parishes. Then you break that down into townships and then into cities, towns, or villages, along with a myriad of unincorporated areas with the mailing address of (often) the nearest post office. These latter examples are my experiences within American borders.

While I’m up on this soapbox, I’m going to pretend that I know what I’m talking about. These borders create nationalism and its various forms that I am not comfortable with. Maybe it’s not borders—maybe it’s religion and the kaleidoscope of personalities—but they seem to create more problems than help. I’m being selfish here because they create problems for me. I need a passport. I need reasons for crossing borders. I need to fill out an occupation for immigration and customs people. If I want to stay for longer than a few months, I need to give governments more money for longer visas or pass citizenship tests or prove that I really do love this man or woman. This all makes me uncomfortable. I want to go where I want when I want.

Now I don’t have a problem with homes and feeling at home in one location and feeling an affinity for that place. I know that as long as my family lives in Dyer, I’ll always feel a pleasant nostalgia when thinking about that place. Complain about how boring and suburban it is, but it is home and was home for the first large fraction of my life. And should I settle somewhere for a lengthy stay, years and years, it’ll be because it appeals to my interests and my aesthetics and my needs and hopefully my heart. Then that place will also be home for me with pleasant and unpleasant memories alike—hopefully more of the former—stuff that only time can build in one’s mind and emotions.

It’s more elements like aesthetics and smiling faces and helpful souls that interest me, not blind nationalism and a vomit-inducing sense of patriotism. Surely where you grow up shapes you in one way or another, but I see little reason to fight over such things. It’s much more fascinating to discuss and share your experiences with strangers than to take a knife to them. Sometimes I think that I’m more of a peace-loving hippie than people who are labeled peace-loving hippies. Surely conflict is fun to watch in TV and movies and to read in books, but let’s keep the battles to silly intangable things like love.

My reason for this soapbox and this blog is because I want to share my thoughts with similar-thinking people, and sadly you are geographically dispersed all over the world. The world may be smaller today than 100 years ago—in terms of getting from place to place much faster—but it’s still huge. The rapidly growing population of over six billion people is overwhelming. There must be thousands and thousands of people out there that I have yet to meet who I will thoroughly enjoy the company of, but many of them I will never meet. It makes you wonder why we hole ourselves away in our little comfort zone where it’s warm and safe and comfortably familiar.