MINIMUM SECURITY
Thursday, April 1, 2021 - daily column #6715
What happens next is unanswerable, nobody has answers we can count on; all we can do is guess …
The big picture, painted with countless global issues – pandemics and statistics, geopolitics, and the inextricably interconnected planet we all ride. Or maybe it belongs to us. I say that because we get territorial about things and our patch of this earth – my yard, our house, our street, our community, province/state, and country. Oddly we are protective of our continents and coastal waters and generally don’t lay claim to open ocean or the floor beneath it. What we have title to and entitlement to is an illusion.
We have the right to draw breath as long as we are able and as long as there is an atmosphere worth breathing. Everything else involves somebody else.
Whether we get one person to agree or not, on any one thing, it’s freedom with limits, and it seems we get what we negotiate. Otherwise, our freedom to go around and be around is always subject to some arbitrary line on a map or a clause in a statute. Life on earth is decreed by human politics and laws – and unless we put up fences and walls and border checkpoints, the landscape is a confusing collage of imaginary boundaries of what is owned, and owed, and controlled – and by whom.
Many of the complexities are ancient and traditional but could be eradicated by a court’s decision, launching an invasion, or executing a contract. In the virtual world, the physicality will diminish, the virtual transaction of life will be swifter and invisible.
And yet, a virus in the air can paralyze everything.
We are at one moment a more peaceful and freedom-loving world than ever, and at the same time prisoners of a minimum-security facility – our borders are closed, our economies become more open or more closed at the stroke of someone’s pen, and democracy is being dis-invented by politicians in control our lives more every day in every country. And we’re becoming so conditioned to it we will probably miss most of the infringements on liberty without noticing much of a difference on any given day.
Reader feedback:
Put down the expectation that I would sleep a full night every night. Off to my pre-dawn walk - middle of the night meditation brought a great turn of phrase.... "Wide Awake Club - know you are never alone when you find yourself staring at the ceiling in the wee hours", JB, Edmonton, AB
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