Wednesday, January 15, 2014

The Reason Borders Seduce Me

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Music transcends borders.  In this case, a provocative article by Anna Badkhen for Foreign Policy shows on how the U.S. slammed shut a border crossing to Mexico after 9/11, isolating and starving a village on the other side.  The passage reopened but not without consequences.

Some snippets from the article:
Borders are where hope and fear, virtue and disgrace reach their utmost density, where our most rigid Manichaean impulse -- to bisect the world into Self and Other -- finds a perfect outlet.
And more to entice you to read:
There is another reason borders seduce me: They are mirrors of the boundaries we carry within, of our inner compasses and intrusions. Even a beloved can be a frontier. I once had a lover who lived by a border, and he was forever redrawing the boundaries of our love.
Read the entire article (requires quick registration):  Ragged Edges

1 comment:

MiGrant said...

A once-cherished possession that I've regrettably lost was a school geography book the belonged to my German mother, published in the immediate aftermath of World War II when it seemed clear that the old borders would not be restored but the new ones were not yet fixed, so that the maps of Europe were drawn with no national borders at all.