Looking Back

Boundaries help us. They differentiate us. They keep us safe. They order our experience. They define us, but they also confine us. Perhaps 2009 has been such a terrifying and exhilarating year because virtually all of our boundaries have been crashed up against, breeched and broken.

The ecological challenges of our planet refuse to be contained by political boundaries, or even by the lines between land and sea. Our country’s place in the world has become a more humble one as we failed to be bounded by our own values in the war on terror or distinguished by industrial preeminence in the global economy. We struggle with the boundaries between citizens and residents. We fight over social boundaries that dictate who may marry. We crashed through racial boundaries in the election of a black president. At the same time, we wrestle with what it means to be human, when life begins, how it can be created and genetically altered, and when it can be terminated.

Simple boundaries like property lines have breeched by foreclosures. Walls exclude willing workers from shrinking workplaces. Jobs cannot be contained within our borders. The shapes of boundaries between the haves and have-nots and have-less’s are continually morphing. The illusory boundaries isolating the famous are dissipated by ordinary people’s fifteen minutes of fame. Information, no longer confined within the walls of a building or between the covers of a book, is ubiquitous. The same technology that feeds our minds assaults traditional boundaries of privacy and personal space. Exploration into outer space continues to point to unimaginable worlds beyond our own while nano technology harnesses the infinitely small.

It is not surprising we have been at loose ends this year. It has been an anxious, growing, ungainly time. Future generations may mark 2009 as the year we began a serious shift in the way we perceive and create boundaries, moving from exclusion to inclusion, taking our first tentative steps out of the protective walls of adolescence into planetary adulthood.