Beyond the walls of our domicile, all borders are figments of our imagination, maintained by mutual fear of those who live on the other side. — T.S. Emery; author, philosopher, nemophilist
My family moved to Maine the summer I started Fourth Grade. We took up residence on the shore of a 500-acre lake, populated by mostly moose and loons in summer and snowbound silence in winter. It was widely accepted in town that the previous owner, also from a Big City, got the better end of the deal by selling 50 acres of mostly swamp land to a fellow City Slicker.
But there was sufficient dry land on the parcel and Mom and Dad had no designs of building more than a home for their budding family and maybe a couple of cabins they would rent out to fellow New Yorkers to help pay the mortgage.
We lived three miles from town, the first mile of which I dreaded nearly every day nearly through my freshman year of high school. A bus took me to school, but my feet took me home. One of Mom’s core edicts was Thou Shalt Not Fight. Unfortunately, there was one boy in the town who had not read the memo.
It was a time when the operative philosophy was “boys will be boys,” and bullies were considered training resources for boys who needed to learn to stick up for themselves.
To T and his toady younger brother (they could have been models for the duo in “A Christmas Story), I was a City Slicker from New York City, wherever that was. Their world ended a few miles away, at the county seat. For some reason, we humans have wired into our DNA that anyone from the other side of whichever boundary is operable is someone deserving of suspicion and someone to be beat up.
Mother did provide me some valuable resources: among them an unlimited supply of books, a love of travel and a celebration of the assortment of beings with whom I ride this whirling rock through the cosmos. On the other hand, she was from Boston, a registered Republican except for the year an Irishman, also from near Boston, and a mere six months older than she, ran for president.
The trouble with borders is they are created for separation, not integration. Throughout my Navy career, I was repeatedly advised to avoid places inhabited by the indigenous population. I was encouraged to be fearful of such places, as though they were different from similar places I frequented back home.
An acquaintance said recently “My daughter is not going there without me.” Her daughter is bi-racial, and Mom thought that fact of biology might be a problem in West Virginia. Her offspring did not it that way; the young woman already had acquired enough stories closer to home to prove she was not completely untouched by bigotry.
Anyway, neither of them really believe the state border encompasses a population not to be found outside its limits.
Our nation seems to have chosen up sides. Three hundred-fifty million of us and growing, trying to pretend we are not repeating the folly of the 1860s, when Yankees pretended to eschew slavery and Rebels pretended slaves were well-tended farm equipment.
Our president has declared that we have spent billions of dollars on failed programs. I submit the biggest failed expense has been our southern border. We tout our nation as the land of opportunity, then build a wall and array an army of armed guards to keep people away who believe in and want to share the promise.
And now our leader has ordered homeless people, who for one reason or several cannot afford the price of a more traditional house or apartment, removed from the sight of visitors to the nation’s capital.
We have renamed the issue that faced our 1860 forebears, but we have far to go to erase it.
Text and Images ©2025 John Messeder. John is an award-winning environmental storyteller, nemophilist and social anthropologist living in Gettysburg, PA. He may be contacted at john@johnmesseder.com