4/29/20

By Josh Rubin

We are witnesses to something that is too large for us to wrap our minds around. We are watching something sweep away the world we once knew. And what follows is not coming into focus. But more and more, it seems that the changes will be profound.

Still, there are many of us who are reluctant to acknowledge the sea change taking place. We pretend that the world we will live out the rest of our days in is still the one we lived in up until a couple of months ago. This is a human thing to do; the changes are dizzying, and we have not found our feet.

A reality that relies on lines drawn and defended has been breached by a disease, and its threat, that knows no boundaries. In our country, absurdly, one might observe, the reaction of many in authority has been to close and tighten those boundaries, as if to protect us from an invading force. Absurd, because the enemy is inside these lines, and scarcer outside.

But the cult of borders is a mainstay of the ancien regime, and does not surrender easily to the new world. And witness the fence built around the refugees of Matamoros, packing them together tightly. More borders, fences. We pretend that we do not live in the same world, despite what the Coronavirus has taught us about such a belief. As if concertina wire could hold back the sea.