Friday, June 10, 2011

Fences in context(s)

A neighborhood with one fence, that fence looks, seems, and is ridiculous. A neighborhood where fences are the norm, you've got one whether you want one or not.
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As a friend said to us, borders are an act of war.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

All national borders are the result of violence if you think about it. The nation state is a testament to violence which is the reason for its being there in the first place, in my opinion I should say.

Ethan said...

That's a good way of looking at it--though I think it applies to all borders, not just national ones.

Unknown said...

Sure, I’d agree with that. It gets back to the property ownership thing which is a weird concept in of itself. “keep out” “private property” “beware of dog.”

Ethan said...

I've been thinking about this because of the book I'm reading (The Many Headed Hydra), which is about the rise of capitalism in the 1600s, and one of the major events in Britain was enclosure, the dividing up of common land into private property. In some ways that time seems so very close to now--because the struggles are essentially the same--and at the same time so very far away--because so many of the ideas that were taken for granted then seem impossible now (and vice versa).