I would be surprised if any reader did not learn in about fifth grade, and readily accept and still remember that "the equator is an imaginary line around the earth."
Assuming this is so, you can likely still see it in your mind, or at least easily find that imaginary line on a globe or a map. You can read "Following the Equator ," by Mark Twain. You can go there yourself. You can read about this imaginary line's relative proximity to the sun compared to the rest of the earth, or to the North or South Pole, two other "imaginary points" we have established in our heads since the days of Gerald Mercator, the great mapmaker who changed the world forever, and whose influence still permeates society almost like water permeates a sponge, from towns, cities, countries, and nations, to the inner sanctum of NASA, to Google Earth and who knows how many other places.
We likewise know that north is "up," south is "down," Australia and New Zealand are places "down under," meaning they are "down under the equator," on the bottom half of the planet.
Yet we also understand that there is no real equator; no up or down in space and thus no "up" or "down" on earth; and if we give it two seconds thought, no tangible boundaries exist on the land, just those imposed by the human mind, trying, at least originally, to make sense of things. We are familiar with the Chinese wall, still standing as a testament to that human urge to separate one group of people from another, ultimately to create a division and a difference, however artificial, between one set of people and another. We know about the Berlin Wall, that lopped off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin. We likewise know that on November 9th, 1989, the border separating West and East Germany was effectively opened, in a twenty four hour or less period of time.
Yet even today, and maybe especially today, we find politicians hollering about establishing a "serious border" between Mexico and the U.S. , along with one between the U.S. and Canada , with the ultimate goal of further separating human beings from one another.
We live in an Alice-in-Wonderland World, where you need passports and paperwork no end to "leave the country," or alternatively stay in a country. We pay untold billions for border guards, buildings, fences, customs offices, and never ending streams of bureaucrats to protect these invisible lines. You can stand on the "four corners" of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado, with part of yourself in each state; yet if you ignore the signs you may feel for the life of you feel like you're standing on a piece of ground anywhere in the world, including your own backyard. You pay different taxes in different states, follow different rules, drive on the "wrong side" of the road if you're in another country, follow different customs in different parts of the world; and the list goes on and on.
John Lennon's song "Imagine" speaks to a world without borders. Here's a YouTube link to a performance by him of that song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b7qaSxuZUg
Yet we have known for seemingly ever that Earth is a round planet floating in space--well, not even floating, but obeying the laws of Newtonian physics in a relative vacuum--and that the human race, aka Homo sapiens, is one species of millions inhabiting "our pale blue dot," in spite of differences in traditions and genuinely minor physical characteristics.
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