Saturday, February 2, 2019

borderless Babel

Syrian refugees burst into Turkey after breaking through a border fence and crossing the boundary separating the two countries in this June 14, 2015 photo. Turkey has been building a concrete wall along parts of the border in recent years. (Lefteris Pitarakis / Associated Press)\

 7-31-2016   More broadly, those who deride borders are unwilling to address why tens of millions of people choose to cross them in the first place, leaving their language fluency and native soil — at great personal risk.  The answer is obvious:  migration, as it was in the 1960s between mainland China and Hong Kong, as it is now between North and South Korea, is usually a one-way street, from the non-West to the West or its Westernized manifestations.  People walk, climb, swim, and fly across borders, secure in the knowledge that boundaries mark different approaches to human experience, with one side perceived as more successful or inviting than the other.  Western rules that promote a greater likelihood of consensual government, religious tolerance, an independent judiciary, free-market capitalism, and the protection of private property combine to offer the individual a level of prosperity and personal security rarely enjoyed at home.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-hanson-borders-20160731-snap-story.html
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Imagine all the people
Living for today (ah ah ah)
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too     -John Lennon, 1971
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11 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.  -Genesis 11:9
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-Bruegel the Elder

                     Now we do steel and glass as big and presumptuous as ever.  -r

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