The arbitrariness of boundaries

I flew to Nashville today and was assigned a window seat. I prefer aisle seats, but windows are better than middles.

Looking out the window over some smallish southwestern city, I was struck by a thought that had occurred to me a couple of years ago, when I was also by a window seat. We had just taken off from San Diego, and I was looking down at the U.S./Mexico border. There was no natural geographical divide. There was just a fence between two countries in the middle of a field. Why there? Why not further North, or further South? Why was there a fence there at all?

Many boundaries are arbitrary. Someone, somewhere made a decision that a boundary needs to be put into place, and that place should be here. Sometimes the boundaries are between countries. Sometimes between states. Sometimes the boundaries are more mental than physical. I believe this, you believe that. I'm right, so you must be wrong.

Sometimes the boundaries are between people of the same race and same religion, but they exist due to differing opinions and positions. Again, I'm right, so you must be wrong.

Most every war ever fought was fought over boundaries. Sometimes physical. Sometimes mental. By mental, I mean all aspects: religious, political, idealogical. Some wars are fought not between countries, but between family and among friends.

Personally, I think that anything anyone can do to eliminate boundaries is a good thing. When I went to Dubai last year (two years ago now?), guess what, they're people too. The less time that we spend trying to defend our rightness, the more time that we have available to eliminate boundaries.

On an individual, personal, visceral level - what can you do to eliminate boundaries?

You don't own your own body... somebody else does

Bits of it, anyway.

"Treating DNA as a chemical, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has issued about 1,000 patents on human genes."

That quote was from this article, written back in the year 2000:

The Scientist : Will Genomics Spoil Gene Ownership?

As an avid reader, a constant on all of my wishlists of family and friends is the following:

A book by any author on any topic.

This has led to my reading of a wide variety of books that I wouldn't have bought for myself, but almost always prove interesting, sometimes fascinating, and occasionally thought provoking.

This past Christmas, Theresa got the latest Michael Crichton book "Next" for me. Always a fan, due to his outstanding ability to combine fact and fiction, it turned out to be all of the above.

I won't tell you anything about the book, other than its creating a desire in me to look up some things. The above article is the first thing that comes up when one Googles "gene ownership".

And it doesn't end there. This from an article out of Stanford University back in 1994:

"Operators of more than a dozen international agricultural research centers have assumed that the plant genes they collect and store belong to humanity in general. The governments of countries, however, are beginning to assert that they own living organisms collected within their boundaries ..."

Compromise needed on gene ownership to protect food supply

I don't know where all this is taking us. But I'm not really sure it's a direction in which I wish to be traveling. And, apparently, I'm not the only one confused and concerned about this:

French doctors puzzle over gene ownership

Wow!

November 13th! That's a lonnnnnng time! Is anyone still out there?

Just had to talk about a couple of things... like pirate Santas and broken guitars... you know... the usual.

First, the pirate Santa:



Noah fell in love with the Santa hat as soon as we pulled our Christmas stuff down from the attic. He put the Santa hat on, and kept walking around saying "Yo, Ho, Ho"! We were having so much fun hearing him, we couldn't bring ourselves to correct him.

Speaking of Christmas, last year, as most of you know, Santa brought the boys their first (probably of many) acoustic guitars.

They couldn't put them down for months and over time, Noah and Grayson went in slightly different directions. Grayson became the guitarist and Noah kept the beat on his drums. Both were still attracted to the guitars though, and they have received more than their fair share of strumming and general musical creativeness. But when we were visiting Edwina and Mark over Thanksgiving (yes, we took the guitars with us to Northern California), Grayson's guitar neck was partially broken from the body. We set it aside so I could attempt to meld the two with some glue when we got home. I did, and it held up reasonably well for another couple months. But the kids were playing last night, and someone "played" the guitar just a little too hard, and we ended up with:



So I guess it's time for at least one new guitar. And this time, we'll have to spring for it...