Borders are Like Boundaries

The fight to eliminate national borders is strange to the point of bizarre, quite like a primitive night terror in which the world as we know it suddenly ends and is replaced by utter chaos. The very idea of strangers, whether benign or evil, being permitted to trespass our borders by some faceless, obscure power based upon their needs, but not ours, is a mixture of both weirdness and evil. No one, even those Democrats seeking a new solid block of voters to strengthen their power, would eliminate any borders if they knew what they were doing. What comes to mind is the famous scene from the movie Dr. Zhivago where Omar Sharif comes home to find the local Communist officer dividing up the house’s rooms for the workers and begrudgingly permitting one of them to the owner’s family. What seems to escape these “faceless, obscure powers” is that everything in the world is based on boundaries. The languages and the architecture styles across the Swiss borders to France, Italy, and Germany are each different just because of the boundaries between them. One can stand at the “Four Corners” in the U.S. southwest and jump from state to state, each one being slightly different from the other three. In New York State, one block to the north is Westchester County and one block south is the Bronx, two exceedingly different legal, economic, and cultural entities. My front door contains a sheet of glass about a quarter inch thick, but it successfully separates my family from the rain, wind, sun, and strangers. People knock on that door and await my arrival and my decision to let them in or not, true even for my best friends and married children. Even my grandchildren knock, albeit in a very demanding way. Our bedroom doors close at night and there is still a lock on the bathroom door to prevent surprises. Clothes separate my poor excuse for a body from the view of others on the street and even at home. Skin separates and protects my guts from the vagaries of the local weather. The organs in my body, thank God, do not mix willy-nilly. I am certain that many on the political left feel it is an awful state of affairs that liver cells spend their entire existence taking out the garbage, while brain cells get to make all the important decisions, but I am pleased as punch that each organ carries out its function so perfectly. Cells in each tissue do their tiny jobs only because they are separated from each other. Cell components function only because they maintain their separate existence behind their very own walls within the individual cell.

This reductionist analysis extends both upwards and downwards. The Earth is separated from the vacuum of space by gravity holding our atmosphere close to the planet’s surface. Under the Left’s influence, each molecule of air would receive an equal opportunity to inhabit any spot in the vast universe it desired without discrimination. Strong magnetic barriers keep cosmic radiation from frying us. Not every cosmic ray has a right to penetrate our bodies. In the other direction, electrons do not pierce the walls of the atomic nuclei about which they revolve. Our analysis may seem too cute by half for those on the left, but they would be wrong. A world without boundaries could not exist, even national borders. I do not mean that the world would be different without boundaries, but that it could not continue to exist in any way that would be of interest to us. In each of the cases mentioned above, the boundaries are porous -- some more and some less -- but their porosity is a function of the needs of the entity of which it is part. Every failure of a boundary constitutes a crisis and needs to be addressed, whether it is ‘leaky gut syndrome’, a hole in the ozone layer, or a cross-border military operation. Boundaries define life at every level. Those who deny the need for national borders are, therefore, obligated to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the situation they envision will be better than the current mechanism and that the changes they seek will not cause more collateral damage than the whole thing is worth. They cannot merely assert their opinions and expect acceptance, except if they do not have our interests at heart. The best crisis available to us from the news feeds today to illustrate this point is the French people versus the Macron government, which they seem to have mistakenly but voluntarily elected.