Today I rode along the US, Mexico border on Highway 9. I caught this remote road just outside of El Paso, Texas and followed it along the south edge of New Mexico to Arizona. I took this route because I wanted to see (or not see) the border wall. Some part of me hoped that it really didn’t exist… but it does. Cutting a black slice across hundreds of miles of desert. 

I don’t want to spark a political debate about the wall. For all I know this blunt instrument might actually be helping. Having seen it first hand however, I seriously doubt that. It is my personal opinion that this wall represents our darkest inclinations as human beings. We are so frightened that someone is going to come and take our stuff. Let me try to give some personal perspective as to what this wall is attempting to withstand. 

When I was traveling in Oaxaca. Chiapas, Guatemala and El Salvador, I saw parades of people walking along the roadways headed north. I didn’t write about them in my blog because the subject seemed too complex for me to express at the time. I also didn’t want to add to the already over-hyped sense of crisis that these people represent. 

They were hard to miss and even harder to ignore. Mostly young adults traveling with their children. Usually carrying a couple small backpacks, the size you would send your 4th grader to school with. That’s all they had. Imagine, if you can, being so poor and desperate that you would be willing to walk from Venezuela to the United States. Over 8,000 miles! Risking the lives of your children and yourself crossing the jungles of the Darian Gap, dozens of hostile borders, and the deadly heat of the long desert march. With nothing but what you could beg for along the way. 

I met many of them. Mostly I would encounter them at street corners, outside grocery stores and along the road. I gave them food when I could and sometimes a few pesos so they could feed their kids. They were friendly and grateful, sometimes tearing up as they received a gift. The look in their eyes would linger in my mind for days as I could not fathom the depth of their ordeal. 

It is an extraordinary privilege to have a US passport. I have traveled though many countries on this trip and many others, always being welcomed with open arms. I’m not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination and yet I have the liberty to ride a machine that others could not even dream of owning. More than that, I have somehow managed wrangle together enough money to take six months off of work to undertake this frivolous journey. These things are not a birthright. Very few people on the planet have the freedom to leave their own borders let alone the means to do so. 

The people walking through Mexico are not a pack of freeloaders or criminals. They are just desperate, hungry and poor. That doesn’t mean that we should just let them into our country either. It’s more to say that in the face of that kind of desperation, I don’t think that our steel barrier is going to pose much of an obstacle. At some point America is going to have to come to terms with the fact that we consume 50% of the world’s resources while most of the world’s population lives in abject poverty. Our shameful blight of a steel ribbon cutting across the landscape is just a visual example of how we think we can fence out this reality. What an extraordinary display of conspicuous wealth. I’m pretty sure that if you actually met them, you would want to think of ways to actually help and not just be shouting “get off my lawn!”.

It seems to be our human nature to put people into the group of “other”. I hope that this trip and my blog has been an example of how we are really all one people, living on one planet with finite resources. I certainly hope we can learn to share better. Though like “the wall” I have my doubts.