Yesterday I wrote about a border wall between Poland and Belarus. For American readers, that story may evoke thoughts of the border between the U.S. and Mexico, some segments of which are also walled. Conceptually, a walled national border should work the same way as a white picket fence — the white fence keeps careless youngsters from riding their bikes across your lawn, or the neighbor’s dog from digging in your flower beds. But let’s be realistic — nobody expects a white picket fence to keep out burglars. To really effectively prevent burglary, you would need to be constantly vigilent. Maybe you would even need a gun. In some parts of the country, if someone threatens you in your home and you shoot that person dead, you will not face any legal consequences.

But I doubt that many of us have the willpower or the stamina to be constantly on guard against burglars. And fortunately, most of us don’t need to be on guard much at all, because we live in “safe” neighborhoods. The reason our neighborhoods are “safe” is because there really isn’t a strong incentive for people to try to steal things from other people. People know that they will generally come out ahead if they are honest and honorable, “stay out of trouble”, find jobs and do constructive work. They also know that if they are caught stealing, they’ll ruin their credibility, they’ll be shunned, they won’t be able to find good jobs anymore, they’ll be on the cusp of a dreadfull downward spiral into hell-on-earth. So, as long as people believe they can get what they need through honest hard work, they generally stay away from theft — often even “going the extra mile” to avoid any risk of being associated with any “suspicious” activities. Of course, there are unfortunately also usually a few people who are way down on their luck, jobless, friendless, unloved, helpless, hungry and desparate — way down at the bottom of that vicious downward spiral. It’s really a travesty that in such an opulant world as we live in, there are still people who fall through the cracks and end up in this hell-on-earth condition. Maybe if each of us took more effort to peek over our own mental white picket fences more often to see what’s happening on the sidewalk, we would all live just a little bit better and this sort of human tragedy would be even rarer than it already is.
The same dynamics apply to nations, and the similarities are getting stronger as global society becomes more fluid and interleaved. Just because someone lives across an ocean from you, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t view them as a neighbor. An Afghanistani girl and her cat fly to Minsk hoping to reach Germany — We are all neighbors on this planet, both virtually and physically. Communities are the essence of humanity, and they are like gardens — they take time, personal attention and effort to cultivate.
To celebrate the notion, please enjoy a few photographs I took this afternoon at the University of Warsaw Botanical Garden: