Always Be Opening

I wrote the below last week and then did not send it. This has happened a lot lately. But I was motivated to send it just now because of the final sentence.

The single pair of footsteps on the beach is when you carried me. 

These days, often, I think of the many friends I have been fortunate enough to make in this life, and it sustains me.

The tide of society has receded and I am, more often than not, more alone than before. I rejoice in being with our children, when work permits. I miss their constant presence during the lockdown. Surely, I am not alone in this.

But that is not why I write today! Rather, one of you asked if I could expand on a recent Instagram story where I claimed:

OPENING BORDERS IS GOOD ACTUALLY

“Could I expand on that?” they asked, in a voice message. (How wonderful that the voice is back, stronger than ever, via voice messages. Texting could not kill it.)

There has been so much written about borders, about nations, about migration that I am going to skirt the literature altogether and jump ahead:

Climate change makes a mockery of borders. 

The nation state served its purpose as well as the coal-powered steam locomotive did – some 218 years ago. 

A few things have changed since then.

For example, the economy of the USA is no longer powered by the energy output of roughly one million enslaved human beings. (That’s 20% of the total population then.)

We also eat a lot more tomato ke-tsiap now, with our french friend potatoes –a tuber introduced to the USA in the 1620s by the British, who had gotten it from the Spanish who had gotten it from the Incas who had developed it slowly, carefully, from a poisonous plant to the fuel that led to a population explosion in Europe in the 17th century.

You see, what we eat, how we survive, from whence (and from whom) we derive our energy is fundamental to the story of nations and, thus, borders. 

No one can predict the future. The sum of the parts is an impossible number to calculate. But we can in fact predict the behavior of complex systems like the climate of the planet Earth. (What a name, no? Earth. Soil. Loam. The source of our food.)

And what we can predict about our climate is, for the sake of brevity, a major disruption to how we feed ourselves leading to large scale migrations. (Same as it ever was; cf., St. Patrick’s Day in the USA to dig only the very tippy top layer of our archaeological records.)

Whatsoever shall we do about the millions of people who will migrate soon, as humans have always done, from the time before we were humans.

Shall we build open-air prisons for them along our borders? Many will. 

We have done so very well here in the land of free and the home of the brave.

For how long can we sustain building such prisons without becoming a police state. (Uh oh. Too late!)

A better question might be: how long can a police state maintain an aura of liberalism – liberty and justice for all. Judging from our current descent (ever quickening, non-linear) into fascism, not very long. 

What will life be like in a police state? Could we adapt? Of course. Most of  human history has been illiberal at best, downright horrific at worst. (Why invent heaven if hell is not already a reality.)

But I, for one, don’t wish such a fate upon my children. 

The other day I met a friend of a friend who is now a television writer. To make small talk (a wonderful thing) he asked me if the numbers tattooed on my forearm are my ATM PIN number. I did not correct him. 

No, they are my father’s prison number, I did not tell him. I wanted my children to know what it means to be related to a person who has been imprisoned. I wanted them to imagine what it means to not be free. Because if you cannot imagine it, you cannot prevent it.

Sadly, many middle and upper class White Americans cannot imagine such a fate. So we wait and see if and when the parallel tracks of liberation (e.g., Critical Race Theory, queerness, democratic socialism) and subjugation (precarity, demonization, authoritarianism) will intersect. 

Wherever they do intersect, that will be the border. 

As always I maintain that our borders are the crucible where our ideals are forged into reality. I choose to judge us by our border. I recommend you consider it. 

I also recommend you consider that the US population is decreasing. It is a small fraction of the population of China and of India. 

If you believe in “The American Way” (more good than bad, I think – and so do most human beings alive today), you should want there to be more Americans. Many more Americans.

To be an American, from day one, has meant coming to America. Immigration. 

Yes, being an American was once defined quite explicitly as excluding indigenous peoples and those who were enslaved. Those who were brought here against their will to serve the needs of the wealthy.

But that need not be the case going forward. Just as women are no longer considered the property of men. Well, not in most states. Not yet.