Borders, or Chalk Outlines in the Sand.

“The best way to look at countries on a map is like a chalk outline drawn by the police when someone dies… what you are seeing with the borders are just outlines of historical crimes… past warlords… empires… its nothing to be loyal to. Have loyalty to reason, to evidence, to ideals… not to lines drawn up mostly by criminals.” — Stefan Molyneux

I agree with almost zero of what Molyneux usually says--and less of what he stands for--however, somehow this quote strikes a chord with me. Even a blind pig finds an apple on occasion. 

Countries are basically these magically attached, by mostly invisible lines, defining chunks of land. They are then united by historical thefts, atrocities, and other criminal behaviors. For example, the United States of America basically stole the southwest part of the country, including California, from Spain. Spain stole it before that from the Native Americans that lived there previously, and even those people overtook it from earlier tribal nations such as the Anasazi nations.

So why is this important? In my humble opinion, it reflects the human need to define itself in all matters of existence, to establish it's tribe, determine it's social and cultural norms, to inclusively segregate. The need to isolate not only cultural and social norms from differing ones that may lie across an invisible, magically determined line is somewhat a recent problem in relation to enforcement. Migration, emigration, immigration, famine, war, and other triggering events have always moved populations of people from place to place.

It seems that the real compassionate question that is not being dealt with is how to get along as a people who share so much in similar human characteristics, yet divide themselves so sharply in cultural, social or religious concepts. The figurative wall that needs to be built would be one filled with bricks of understanding, the mortar of social exploration and designed with open communication of shared values and possibilities of positive growth.

You still might have to place some guards here and there, to ensure some circumstantial and situational incursions of "bad" elements along parts of the wall are addressed, but if you build it with no way to see and engage the humanity of others, is it worth it?