Borders Are Fake
by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
The fact that borders are divorced from reality has long vexed me. They are fictions drawn by men wielding guns and pens, men whose avarice has turned them maniacal. The fact of a fence erected across the Sonoran Desert means nothing to the rest of the natural world, at least until Tecate cypress trees are bulldozed to build it, and its iron posts restrict bobcats and bighorn sheep from obtaining water from the oases they have frequented for thousands of years. Borders are a construct that imposes harm, that brings destruction; their purpose is slashing the land with a scythe that inevitably turns back upon us. People and other living things are collateral damage in the primacy of the fiction of the border.
The author and activist Michael Brownstein wrote about this fact in “Let’s Burn the Flags of All Nations,” a poem generally about “releasing the stranglehold of the nation-state” and finding “our way to true community.”
It was in this spirit—and to honor Brownstein, who died in a car accident near Woodstock, New York, last September—that I spent part of my May Day alongside a collective of his friends and admirers. We gathered in a small park along a median in front of the UN building in Manhattan, with the purpose of literally burning the flags of all nations.
Keep us breathing fire!
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