Opening borders root — a short introduction to this piece.
Opening borders root: Quick Notes
To travel from one place to another, particularly in this, our fragmented postmodern age means to traverse liminal border spaces: highways, airport waiting rooms, bus depots, interstate highways–what Fredric Jameson calls the “hyperspace” of late stage capitalism. Yesterday I found myself on a longer than expected liminal journey, making my way, via public transit, from central Los Angeles to pet sitting duties in Pomona, a little over 30 miles east.
As coincidence would have it this journey coincided with the protests that were taking place in Downtown Los Angeles surrounding Trump’s ICE raids and the arrest of union leader David Huerta. My trip kept skirting the zone where protestors faced off with an alphabet soup of law enforcement agencies. The bus I was on diverted as did the long range commuter bus I was expecting to catch. Stops were re-positioned unexpectedly. I jumped on the subway to get to Union Station thinking I could get my commuter bus there only to find it diverted to a stop outside the station. While I couldn’t catch the bus I found myself with a view of hundreds of police cars streaming towards a blockade of the 101 freeway. I ended up giving up on the bus and catching a train. The minor inconveniences I faced are, of course, nothing compared to the journeys many immigrants have made to this country in search of a better, peaceful life.
Ironically, I was in Los Angeles to attend Pentecost services, a day that celebrates an abolishment of borders, when the apostles found themselves communicating in languages they didn’t speak and implying a new way of doing things outside the boundaries of identitarian affiliations. As the new pope, Leo XIV put it in his Pentecost homily,
The Spirit opens borders, first of all, in our hearts. He is the Gift that opens our lives to love. His presence breaks down our hardness of heart, our narrowness of mind, our selfishness, the fears that enchain us and the narcissism that makes us think only of ourselves. The Holy Spirit comes to challenge us, to make us confront the possibility that our lives are shrivelling up, trapped in the vortex of individualism.
“I dreamed I could Fly” by Jonathan Borofsky in the Civic Center subway station.
During my trip I kept encountering something I find very odd: the use of classical music to, somehow, magically make unwanted homeless people go away. I went to grad school to study music and can’t help but notice this. The 7-11 near the beginning of my bus trip blasts classical music. I encountered it in the Civic Center subway station and in the bathroom at Union Station. Instead of using our national resources to provide health care, housing and education we spend it on the military that Trump is sending to Los Angeles and on the obscenely expensive gadgets monitoring us from the air. When this diversion of resources leaves people homeless, rather than get people housing and the help they need, we put up some speakers and blast Bach. Welcome to dystopia.
No, despite the propaganda, the whole city of Los Angeles is not somehow out of control. Most people are going about their normal business–remember, this is an enormous city both in population and square mileage–but I think it’s safe to say that most people here are angry at the hatred directed at our immigrant neighbors. If the hope was to intimidate us it’s not working. We’re coming together instead. As the pope says in that same homily, “Where there is love, there is no room for prejudice, for “security” zones separating us from our neighbors”
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Opening borders root appears here to highlight key ideas for readers.
