Borders are, by their nature, permeable. Our first and most intimate border, our skin, encloses within its boundaries many more cells that are 'not us' than cells that are 'us'. We can only live due to the constant flow of what is 'not us' into 'us' - air, water, food, sunlight... We could not digest anything without the six pounds of bacteria living in our gut. 'Us' is not really separable from everything else at any given moment. The boundaries are porous, the solid is liquid.
Yet when I distinguish what is 'me' from what is 'not me' I am enlisting a useful, if partial, truth. I am hungry, he has the food; I have the chicken pox, she does not (yet). These are useful distinctions. They are basic to our existence. It is only when these partial truths become mistaken for the whole truth that problems arise. When borders are mistaken for absolutes, when the permeable is imagined to be impermeable.
The notion of 'securing our borders' would be laughable were it not so frightening. We can not even secure the borders of our bodies, which have actual boundaries - and were we to secure them, it would mean instant death. How then could the borders of a nation, which is nothing but a human concept subject to perpetual revision, be secured? Anyone who has crossed a border - between states or countries - has noted that it is not really pink on one side and green on the other, as indicated on the map. 'There' looks an awful lot like 'here'. Whilst standing in our socks in the airport security line, toothpaste and shampoo well-ensconced in plastic baggies, we undergo inconvenience and a slightly degrading public display of hosiery in a feeble ritualistic attempt to ensure our security - as a nation.
With the largest military in the world, by magnitudes, we still do not feel secure. With life expectancies and rates of maternal and infant survival that would have been unimaginable to previous generations, with a relative assurance of access to some kind of food and shelter, with vaccines and antibiotics at our disposal, we still do not feel secure. Because we are not secure. Because security vs. insecurity is not true. There is more and less security: security, like everything else, exists along a continuum, a permeable boundary which can be surprisingly breached at any moment, in any number of surprising ways. Security is never, can never be, absolute.
What exactly, then, is this security that we are hoping for? What is it that we dread? If security has any relationship to happiness, then America is paradoxically a most insecure place, indeed. While our politicians bluster on about the greatness of this country, the populace is busily ingesting prescription drugs for depression, imbibing alcohol and a slew of illegal substances to 'take the edge off', and engaging in mind-numbing activities of all stripes. Our drive for accumulation continues unabated, even while studies show us again and again that, once a basic standard of living has been attained, having more money and goods does nothing to increase happiness. The bankruptcies multiply, the foreclosures skyrocket, the businesses get offshored, and the pension funds get looted. Our schools falter while our prisons fill up. There is no uncertainty as to the eventuality of our deaths, it is only a question of mode and time. There is uncertainty, however, in the matter of how we will live our lives, and what security can be found within them.
A human baby needs a face, a pair of eyes, to imprint upon in order to experience a 'bond of secure attachment', in order to thrive. The security comes from the relationship, the highly permeable boundary between mother (usually) and child. It is tragic that, as a nation, while we are fixated on the notion of security we are becoming ever less secure, ever less relational. Sequestered within our homes, our cars, walking the streets plugged into earphones or cell phones which render public spaces private, we become ever more removed from the very things that could give us the sense of security we seem to long for - relationship, connection, an acknowledgement of interdependence. We feel not only estranged from other humans, but estranged from the other millions of species we share this planet with. Weapons are no match for this problem. Border fences are erected as monuments to our painful delusions of separation, as we attempt to deny the simple and pleasurable fact that we are all, irrevocably, in cahoots.