April 5, 2025- “Making bridges out of walls that keep us apart”-line from a 1970s Baha’i song.

A few things became clearer today, after two videos were shown of the situation at the border between the United States and Mexico. First, as I had suspected after my own visits to border communities, over the past thirty-seven years, the communities on either side of the frontier are tightly-knit, one to the other. This is not just true of First Nations communities, like the Tohono O’odham and Quechans. The two cities that are both called Nogales-one in Arizona, the other in Sonora-are no more easily divided than, say, the Kansas Cities, or the Niagara Falls. Borders,necessary as they are to our own contrived sense of social order, are essentially artificial. We need national borders, for our concept of organization to make sense-the same way we need family dwellings and property; towns and cities; counties, states, provinces, prefectures and oblasts.

The second instance of clarity is the futility of maintaining border as illusion. An octogenarian woman from southern Arizona walked segments of the border, in her video, and showed even a few militia members that there are both gaps in the iron wall and places where cartel members have dug underneath the bollocks and spires. The government can police entry and exit from this country to a certain extent, but no less a conservative voice than Phil Boas, of The Arizona Republic, has noted that the Mexican cartels have a presence in all 50 states, all parts of the Americas and the four other inhabited continents, as well.

There are two features of human life that are primarily feeding the strength of the cartels: The natural mobility of the human race and the perceived need of many for an external substance that can provide a sense of personal security/self-worth. It was pointed out that both of these factors have been turned into revenue sources, by the international criminal element-aided and abetted by certain of the international financial and political elite. Personal safety has been shaken, in many villages of Latin America and Africa, by the very same gangs who then offer transport to the United States or western Europe-at a premium. Substances, both natural and man-made, are trafficked by the same entities. All of these activities are promulgated at the point of a gun, or even more serious weapons, like armed drones and artillery.

Walls and wire are offered by the flip side of the same coin that is represented by the cartels. The one engages in disorder; then, the other comes in and offers to solve the problem, through a heavy hand. It’s a timeless story, and yet, we have failed, as a species, to put two and two together.

The solution is perhaps long to yet come, but it entails self-awareness; self-love and self-discipline. Only when the communities of the world are comprised primarily of emotionally and spiritually mature people, can we hope to cast off the twin controlling agents of autocracy. I am seeing glimmerings of hope, in that regard, with open resistance to overbearing governments, in countries across the globe (South Korea, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Poland, Syria and Brazil being recent examples) and more nascent, but still lively, resistance to the cartels, in certain communities of both the Americas and the “Old World”. We saw evidence of both, today, in all 50 states, every U.S. territory and in several other countries with large American diaspora.

Rising past autocracy takes personal discipline, and that takes self-love.