Egregious Reader

“Even if a wall was constructed, it’s not a cure-all. When any human being is facing starvation and unimaginable violence, he or she will do nearly anything to survive—including scaling a wall or crossing an ocean, as we’ve witnessed among the throngs of Syrian refugees escaping Europe. If a wall is the only thing that stands between near-certain death and the possibility of life, you and I would risk everything to climb over it, because the risk of staying put is far greater than the fear of being caught. ‘Show me a fifty-foot wall,’ former secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano once said, ‘and I’ll show you a fifty-one-foot ladder.’”

I started a new blog as I have been working on writing longer essays. I decided to call it Frontera because it is Spanish for border and more and more I want to write to explore borders of all kinds. The obvious one that comes immediately to mind is our Southern border. My friend Samuel asked me once United States citizens talk about being American when what they mean is United Statian. (Obviously we need to work on that term). Where else do countries pretend to represent the entire continent (two continents) while clearly excluding other nations on that continent? But, the are borders everywhere and there is borderland around those borders. What is it like to enter the borderland? Borderlands are also the places where new things are born. Many explanations of Jazz say it was when classically trained Creole musicians joined Delta blues ... Yo Yo Ma in a recent interview said this about the borders (boundaries): Pablo Casals used to talk about — the great cellist from Spain,