14.02.2006 Notes From The Borderline – Or: The Cycle For Peace |
 As you all might already have guessed, Planetkat has absolutely no borders and/or frontiers, and, for that matter, no immigration laws and importation regulations. There are no visas and travel restrictions, which unfortunately, is not the case on Planet Earth. This makes living there a somewhat serious affair. It is serious. So serious that people get killed on a daily basis if they want to go from one “country” to another without the necessary papers. How weird: our planet which serves as a home for all of us is actually subdivided by invisible power lines which stretch all across the globe and affect everyone's life. Even yours—even if you haven't paid it a second though until now. I actually hadn't. I just decided, in my spacey way, that I wanted to move myself to another part of the planet. But more about my specific case when the time is right. Now a rather unacademic celebral workout about living with or without, within or without borders. Invisible Power Lines Stretched Across Our Lobes So what exactly are borders? Well, for someone looking from outside our hemisphere, gazing down onto our blue planet, it's not easy to understand what they really are. Although some of them, like the Chinese Wall, are even visible from outer space. But most of them are more than invisible power lines that work like membranes through which we can permeate. Or can't. How to explain this concept to an alien? Or the people from Planetkat? Why do they exist? Do they really exist? Or are they only in our heads? Who is living within, and who without, and why? What is the purpose of exclude or include places, races and faces? Whereas some have the ticket to ride, others have no legal rights to space out how they desire… It all depends where you are coming from. Imagine you’re an “Arabic African” and you want to go to “Japan”. Bad luck, I say. You might have a ticket… but there still is a great chance you will never end up in the place you originally wanted to go. You might end up in custody facing an endlessly repeated catalogue of questions and dense facial expressions. It might be a hotel room used as detention cell which you have to pay until they put you back on the plane to return you to the “country” you came from. Especially if you had intentions to stay for longer than a “holiday”. Holidays in a detention cell. Being able to live with a loved one. Finding work where your input might be valuable. It is all made possible or impossible by a political system. Set up by the same people who decided aeons ago that there actually are frontiers – borderlines of territories where two or more tribes of people would collide. Collaterally. How did this happen? The coming and going, the shrinking and growing of the population is something natural. Demographics are heavily influenced by the fluctuation of variables such as availability of food, resources, work, women, men, medicine, water, and people. Instead of accepting this free flow of human resources in search or wanton of a living to be made wherever this should be possible, those in power decided to control the population in the respective territories they call theirs. Nowadays a complex affair, with governments serving as a back-up plan as nature fails to deliver. Without the artificial nurturing of our respective country, many of us would be condemned to die. Like chickens in a breeding plant. Kept alive by giant helpings of penicillin. Breeding plants? Run down factories? Is this what they are, our countries? What are… countries? No more than places that are, based on a construct created by human imagination, home to a certain group of people. For someone looking from outside, all this is not visible. There are continents, rivers and oceans which serve as natural divides between climatic zones and ecosystems. Each with its unique character, just like its inhabitants. This is where the romantically postpostmodernist Sixties vision of Planet Earth ties in. We are all different, but part of the same thing. United Nations: Multicoloured flags and teams of athletes that are ready to win gold in the Olympic Games. Friends all over the planet communicating in Esperanto. Hope at the end of the tunnel. Says good ole Mahatma Gandhi: “I am always ready to endorse any honest movement which will help to unify the people of the world ...just as I am in favour of a universal coinage for ALL countries...” Right. Done. And while we’re at it, visa reforms. Why not take our friendship further? Everyone can live everywhere. Let’s make this a fair game, champs. The Myth of The Beautiful First World Will Live On I mean, why not? What is it? Why does everyone pretend we are the same although we all know were not—even worse, we actually help to sustain and nurture an unjust system. Is it because we actually do not want to give and share? I don’t think so. And I don’t want to be a hypocrite. I got here not because I am a New World traveller with some broken beats in my overweight luggage which I am trading for love and appreciation. But I also got here because I profit from the exchange rate Euro/Peso Argentino. Another example which let’s me wake up. We First World citizens profit big time from the poor. Not only when we buy tacky shit for a few pennies that was screwed together by an eighteen years old employee whose working hours hit the twenty on a daily basis running overtime on amphetamine consumption too. Who cares, this is bloody China. We profit because we can fly to Thailand. We can chance our entire wardrobe four times a year – winter, summer, winter sales, summer sales… We profit because we can afford to be lazy, ill, useless, sick, overweight. We profit because live in a system we don’t like but accept. We profit because we don’t have to move our asses. We profit because someone else has got to do it. But hey, it’s just so okay. The myth of the beautiful First World will live on even through our apparently sane world is being blasted into pieces by “terrorists”. People from outside our system trying to blow apart our blinding shields. It won’t happen. Just as the ships full of dying Africans does not lead to a healthy immigration law. We rather let the “race” die out as we fail to reproduce in our golden cage—just like white tigers in the zoo. As I was running through the visa application procedure, I was constantly told I am a “good” immigrant. I – apparently – did not come here Argentina to profit of the social welfare system—free education and healthcare—which sets me apart from the stream of Bolivians, Paraguayans and Peruvians. And Chinese. They enjoy special regulations here as the Chinese government haggled out a deal with the Argentineans. Free import and no taxing for Chinese traders, cheap wares for the Argentineans to give them the impression of wealth and wellbeing while the capital is sucked out of the country. The same old game. Gold for glass beads. But why worry. I am a “good immigrant”. A book judged by its cover. Blue eyes with a couple of braincells hidden behind them rubbing together in a straight fourfour rhythm. The madness continues. But there are ways against it. I just can’t help it but post this article called ‘Peace Cycle Passes Through Jail Asylum’ I found in The Guardian in 2002. Written by Oliver Burkeman in Washington: “Reza Baluchi says that he only wanted to spread love and understanding. The 30-year old Iranian had been cycling around the world, communicating his ‘message of peace’ to 54 countries – and racking up 46,000 miles – when his arrival at the US Mexican border in November proved how badly this message was still needed. US border guard arrested him and he was sent to an Arizona detention centre for nearly four months. This week Mr. Baluchi’s message finally got through when a judge in the town of Florence, LaMonte Freerks, granted his request for political asylum. But he remained in custody while lawyers decided whether to appeal against his decision. Mr Beluchi said he had applied for a US visa in Mexico, but after three months’ wait he got lost cycling near the border. Love And Kisses, Zaphod ‘I slept in my tent. Helicopter comes. I don’t know I cross border,’ he told the Arizona Republic newspaper. His lawyer, Suzanna McClay, said that before fleeing Iraq, Mr. Beluchi had been arrested for wearing a Michael Jackson T-shirt and carrying a video of a romantic film, then beaten and hung by his wrists from a tree. He was later jailed for 18 months for membership of a dissident group. Mr Baluchi plans to complete his journey of a lifetime by riding to Los Angeles and running to Ground Zero. ‘They cannot stop me,’ he said. ‘I run for peace.’” Baluchi’s constant struggle for freedom reminds me of the lifetime work of Fraser Clark, an old friend of mine who has been somewhat of an inspiration when I was younger. Praising the new age zippie, a hippie who uses technology, he travelled the entire North American continent with a solar powered sound system to spread his understanding of new age zippieism to an anticipative nation of sympathisants. Accompanied by his friend Terence Mc Kenna whose lifelong investigations in the effects of psychoactive substances were groundbreaking they both set out to transform several individuals’ mindsets with their simple yet compelling worldview. Love, Peace And Unity Through Technology. But that’s another story. More about these two brave renegades another time! Soon! I, however, apart from spreading the vibes, would like (please, please do get inspired by this ground breaking concept! The copy wrong is yours! The more people do it, the better!) to travel to countries like Burkina Faso, Myanmar, French Guyana, Mongolia, Oman and Georgia one day to claim asylum. You might ask yourself why. Why? Well… It’s ridiculous. I am not dying of hunger in the place I am coming from neither do I get killed if I open my mouth to tell what I really think—as it happens to millions of people that try to come to our “fortress” Europe. No. It’s worse than that. Pitiful: I feel I am dying spiritually in my over-saturated capitalist country where people, companies and politicians don’t understand that our system breeds social injustice and political instability in the other parts of the world. We live in a protected cage system, which is sustained by modern age slavery. Instead of opening our eyes and share all we have, we punish those who come in search of a better life willing to give up all they know and hold dear plus those who are not willing to give up what they know and hold dear. Aaaargh. I feel we in Europe and the people in the States have no concept of what it means to be PART of this world. We think we own it. Because our statesmen and companies are “running” it. And now… could you please stop the planet? I wanna get off. Love and kisses, Zaphod. |
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