Monday, May 24, 2010

A World Without Flags, Borders and Anthems


It's been in my thinking for a long time now (perhaps because I've been an immigrant all of my life, so far living in five countries), how ridiculous and anachronistic it is that we have borders.

Where's the logic and the sanity and the compassion in a world that is divided up into regions by invisible lines in the sand and ocean?


Where one's lot in life is basically decreed by a geographical accident of birth?

Where, if you're born one foot on this side of that invisible line you have a certain kind of life, and if you're born one foot on the other side of that line you have another kind of life?

And where some people get to control the majority of the resources on the planet and others get to do without?

Where's the equity and compassion in all of that?

And borders and flags and anthems and patriotism all lead us to separate ourselves from the 'others' and give us cause to make the other an enemy and to criticise and to disparage and to exploit and to fight and to exterminate.

Where's the compassion in all of that?

Isn't it time we did away with this ridiculously outdated notion of countries and national interests?

We're living in an interconnected web.   What we do, how we live here in the web affects someone, something elsewhere in the web.   Because we're living in a closed system, when we take more than we need on a moment by moment basis, when we claim our 'rights' to a certain piece of land or a body of water, to a certain lifestyle and degree of comfort, someone, somewhere else has to pay the price, do without.

Where's the compassion in that?

Who thinks about that when they're shopping at Walmart or Costco?
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
...
Living life in peace
 

~John Lennon (9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980), English musician and singer-songwriter, political activist...
 

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