The World Wasn’t Made with Borders.
Last weekend, under a threat from ICE officials of upcoming raids, I gathered with hundreds of other activists to protest the following: immigration detention facilities, separation of families at the border, treatment of asylum seekers at the border, unsafe and inhumane conditions at the facilities at the border and the aforementioned ICE raids.
Thinking about the border got me thinking about maps. I like maps. In general I do have a good sense of direction, but I like know where I am in relation to other things. It helps me feel like I have a place. I have a home. Which is why I find these maps by Oliver Jeffers so interesting:
“While in the process of [making maps], I thought of how through the ages maps have had political slants. European maps had a tendency to make Greenland much larger than it really was, and Africa much smaller, simply so Europe would appear prominently in the center. Maps that appeared in US classrooms severed a crack right through Russia and West Asia, just so North America would also appear at the forefront. In recent years I have been taking those political motivations for how maps have been drawn, and playing with them…turning them on their head, and using the visual language of cartography as a means to make other social commentary.”
From Jeffers’ website:
The world wasn’t made with borders. We put so much energy into these imaginary lines in the sand that say you go here and I go here and don’t come near me, and the ways maps and lines are drawn separate us in so many more ways than just physical distance.
Here’s an old clip from the West Wing that sums things up nicely:
I want to leave you with a few other words that should know no borders:
“The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”
–Hubert Humphrey
“…Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
– The New Colossus, Emma Lazarus (cast onto a bronze plaque in the Statue of Liberty)
I think The United States should be welcome to all, and a home to all those who need it, regardless of which imaginary line we had to cross to get here.