Arbitrary Barriers Stand Between Us And A Better Future

About 25 years ago, when Czechoslovakia was still under communist rule, I was invited as a student to an underground philosophy seminar in Prague. The professor coined a thesis that borders serve only special groups, enabling them to retain their power and protect their interests.

For people living behind the Iron Curtain, that was not a provocative thesis. We all hated the Iron Curtain. Yet I could not help raising some objections.

Professor, I said, not all borders are the Iron Curtain. Some borders can be good, to protect our cultural heritage, so that we stay who we are.

The professor asked for an example.

I replied that people in Bohemia drink beer, while people in France drink wine. If we make cheap French wine available with no restrictions, will not our people switch to wine? Will not French people switch to beer for the same reason? So our national identities will be gone.

Laugher erupted but the professor seemed undisturbed.

You just made my point, young man, he told me. Who are you to prescribe anybody - a Czech or a Frenchman - what to drink? If somebody keeps a tradition because there is no other choice, what is the value of that tradition? Borders are of no use.

This episode came to my mind about two weeks ago when the computer consulting company I run had a series of service calls with Microsoft. Yes, I paid for the calls and, yes, I was reimbursed later because we discovered a product bug. But there was something special about that case.

The engineer handling it dealt with me as if I were from the same corporation. He gave me some product information that was not easily obtainable. He even sent me his source code that would have enabled me to create my own modifications and optimizations.

That is very, very unusual. I had a feeling that a border just came down.

I understand that treating our company as if we were part of Microsft makes business sense. We test their new technology. We recommend their solutions. But it makes sense to us and our clients, too. Borders are of no use.

New epochs are not marked by changes in calendar, they are defined by changes in attitudes. In Spokane, a border came down when a public-private partnership was established to revitalize downtown.

Many businesses besides Microsoft treat their clients as partners. Yet we have a long way to go in breaking borders that push us down.

Some borders are officially established, some are virtual. We live in a world that is divided into industrialized and developing countries. Us and them.

There are problems in our inner cities: drugs, guns, violence, poverty. But those are their problems, not ours, aren’t they?

The need to have some “them” to hate is so big in some people that they do not even pay attention to how the division is defined. Radio talk show hosts use that to their advantage. Liberals are gun haters, leftists, homosexual activists. There is no need to specify those terms. Everybody knows what they mean. And with that clarity it is easy to hate them.

Some people are eager to create an icon so they can hate it and distinguish themselves from that icon. The underlying current is that the world is divided into us conservatives and them liberals, or us gun owners and them gun haters.

That those groups exist is clear. I, for instance, am a gun hater because I do not believe guns should be available to unlicensed civilians, law-abiding or otherwise. But that is not because I hate freedom or crave to destroy it, or want a tyrannical government, or want the criminals to have an advantage. I just don’t see the reason for guns to be available.

Rush Limbaugh sometimes actually defines liberals as people who want everybody to be dependent on the government and who hate people taking care of themselves. That idea, I think, is empty.

If you want to create borders you have to play the us-them game. And the less clear the definition of “them” is, the better.

Why should we care about them in inner cities or poor countries? For the same reason the Russian nobility should have cared about their peasants and the French nobility should have cared about their common folks. They did not and Marie Antoinette was beheaded, Russia was demolished by the revolution, and we will see the increase of terrorism internationally and crime domestically. < We have to build justice if we want to live in peace and prosperity in the next century - not fences, not iron curtains, not borders, not prisons, but justice.

Justice for all.