So, I’m in Nogales, AZ. Came down here to see the spot where José was shot across the border and killed by U.S. Customs Border police. A sad story, as so much of what regarding the United States’ border with Mexico is, particularly in light of the politics of the day, not least because an innocent boy lost his life and a family lost a son. To add to the family’s pain, it’s nearly impossible to prosecute an officer for an incident of this sort. In fact, to my knowledge, the prosecution, and the found guilty verdict, of the officer who shot José was a first in history. This took yearssss, however. Anyway, just being over by the wall was such a singularly surreal experience. I’d never been anywhere near the U.S.-Mexico border before, and yet there I was standing beneath the wall, peering up at it, and sighting along its length: a twenty-ish foot steel wall, slatted so that one can see through it. A monstrosity which dominates the town because it is so very hilly here, and so it rides those undulations of the hills so that no matter where you are you never lose sight of it. I can only imagine the feelings of the residents on either side of this… thing. I can ONLY imagine, and perhaps my imagination differs from reality. Do they feel like caged rats, subjects in someone’s science experiment? A remarkably sentient tropical fish swimming back and forth along the glass of an aquarium?

This is just the silliest thing in the world to me, that we create these barriers around each other, because, really, we’re all humans. We’re all the same people, essentially. And when one travels over land, either by bicycle or by car, you see that the land continues, and animal and plant life continues, and it all bleeds and blends together, and fluctuates and changes with climate zones, terrain, soil types, etc. And the fact that we create these borders… I mean the idea of countries is utterly ridiculous. Yes, culturally we might be different, but again, that’s something to be shared, and there’s some of that going on, but at the same time the idea of sticking a huge wall up, like that clown Trump insists, is utterly insane (particularly because there already exist walls along this border where it’s been deemed necessary). That money could go towards countless more beneficial social/industrial/environmental projects rather than trying to divide us further as human beings.