Invisible Borders

So... we’re going to build a reinforced fence on the border between the United States and Mexico... all the way from the Pacific Ocean at San Diego and Imperial Beach and Tijuana to the Gulf of Mexico at San Benito, Texas, and Matamoros, Mexico.  We’re going to beef up the Border Patrol on the U.S. side (doubling the number to 40,000 agents)so if they were all deployed at the same time we would have an officer every 500 yards along the entire border. The proposal ($40 billion... that’s with a B, over the next decade) by the “gang of Eight” senators was approved by a preliminary vote 67-to-27.  Some on both sides of the aisle in the Senate object.  On the Democratic side, some are saying the measure means undocumented will have to wait for years before they can even seek legal status; and on the Republican side, the Tea Party folks are howling that the program isn’t tough enough and the fence isn’t high enough to keep Mexicans out of the U.S.  

Over coffee this morning my friend used the expression invisible borders; and the idea has been on my mind all day.  My country is ghettoized to a shocking extent. Poor people live near other poor people.  Rich people live on estates or in fine apartments where other people with wealth live.  People neither rich nor poor live in clusters, too.   Even though the boundaries are invisible, children grow up knowing where they are. They are carefully taught where not to go.  They know where they belong.  They grow up knowing where the borders are, and then they forget to remember consciously why they go where they go and why they don’t ever go beyond the borders that separate them from the areas where “the others” live. There are no signs warning that most people who live in distinct sections of the city are poor.  The borders are drawn not so subtly.  Everybody knows.  Yet the people living in clusters rarely talk about what makes the clusters distinct. 

At the end of this day in which I rode my bicycle for a couple of hours through three or four distinct communities in my city, I retreated back to my hill where I met for supper with a dozen other people who are very much like me.  We are roughly the same age; we are white; we are educated; we are politically liberal, we have had professions that gave us retirement with reasonable affluence; we have traveled the world and continue to travel regularly to far-away places.  

But today we were here together for supper by our carefully fenced, perfectly maintained community pool, secure in our ghetto with its invisible borders. Today was Ruth’s birthday.  One of our group ordered pizza.  Someone brought dips and chopped vegetable, and others brought salads.  We enjoyed a modest wine before and during supper.  Irene made a cake. Most people had decaf coffee with the cake. All of those things are typical and utterly predictable in our community. We talked about Edward Snowden, Travon Martin and George Zimmerman, and our favorite Netflix television series; and before the dark of night fell on our community, we retreated to our apartments the way we always do in the place where we live.