Sonja Egeland Kelly

An old Israeli tank points its weapon directly at a nearby Syrian village in the Golan Heights. This narrow strip of land is one of the world's most highly-contested borders.

I was driving a friend home tonight, crossing borders that marked distinctly different neighborhoods. We started out in my own Oak Park. Quiet, affluent, and majority white, this small enclave feels “safe” to me. It holds the restaurants I frequent, my local movie theater, and the neighborhood Trader Joe’s. As we left Oak Park, I felt (as always) a heightened sense of my surroundings. We crossed Austin Boulevard and began to drive into in the Austin neighborhood. Busy, economically depressed, and 98% black. While my church is in this neighborhood, and many of my friends live here, I have never felt entirely comfortable driving through at night. It maintains a different dialect and a seemingly different set of social rules. What few restaurants are in Austin are named things like “The Manna Soul Food Cafe.” There are no movie theaters, because people don’t seem to have the money to see movies. You can buy your groceries at Aldi or at Dollar General in Austin. After about ten minutes, at Cicero, the neighborhood changed again, and this time to a literally different language. Humboldt Park, a primarily Latino neighborhood, filled with impromptu food trailers and local fruit markets. If you want a melon here, you just have to drive around and look for the right pickup truck selling them out of the back. My friend reminds me that since it is after eleven in the evening, I should consider avoiding this street and that one and the other one west of that other one. A new world, just with the crossing of one mundane line.

I have crossed other borders in my life too–the immigration counter in the airport in Chicago, London, Rome, Cape Town, Accra, Santiago, Nairobi, Stockholm, Jerusalem, Tokyo, to name a few. The invisible line that a train crosses while traveling through Europe, with the immigration officers that board the train only indication we have entered a new country. The border between Israel and Syria, in the Golan Heights Region, with the UN camp sitting precariously diplomatically in the middle.

I once walked across a border. I had just spent ten days in Morocco. My feet were filthy from the dust, my body was smelly from the heat, and my mind was exhausted from translating the French. My boyfriend and I approached the Morocco side of the border with apprehension, passports in hand, and were practically waved through. We walked across a 100-yard no-man’s-land, with a barbed wire fence behind and a concrete and electric fence ahead. When we entered Spain, it was like we had walked into a new world. Different language (and with relief I realized that my Spanish came to me much easier than my French), different sense of space (the women at the bus stop touched me when they were talking, and I realized that Moroccan women had not wanted to get close to me), different rules (on the bus, someone heard we had come from traveling through Morocco and gave us a beer from his grocery bag: “Espana tiene libertad!” or something).

How incredible that we respect, fear, and even merely acknowledge borders. Seemingly arbitrary designations that determine our culture, our language, our politcal system, our time zone…. Had they known at the Treaty of Westphalia that they were pioneering a system that would keep us with an acute sense of the “other,” I wonder if they would have done anything differently.

And now, with all of the efforts to bridge, or even transcend borders, I wonder how engrained our sense of our own boundaries are. What will an even more unified EU look like? How does a unified currency affect the fluidity of a border? Can global companies just ignore the constraints that borders place on them? The questions continue, and I am not sure whether the answers are forthcoming. Regardless, I crossed back late tonight into my own territory, and settled down to dream about what lies on the other side of the line.