Those of us in democracies think that they’re the best way of doing things that we have found so far. We tend to think that democracy started off when it was first called democracy by the Greeks.

Yet, if we look throughout human history, we see what democracy looks like.

However you believe humans showed up, be it by deity or evolution, the common thread is that humans started somewhere. From that somewhere, humans scattered all over.

We don’t talk about why because we don’t know why.

We could have fun speculating. Maybe there wasn’t enough food in an area. Maybe one group migrated away from another group because they couldn’t agree on which end of the spear to use when hunting, where the group that used the wrong end was erased by history because of their stupidity. Maybe they couldn’t agree on how many stones to throw at an adulterer. Who knows? The point is that a group made a decision to leave and voted with their feet.

There’s a reason we use this term.

This was democracy. If you didn’t like how things were going you could leave. You could wander off that way in the belief and/or hope that things would get better over there, and maybe it had something with the society where you were.

Humanity did this until it started running into each other again. Our technology advanced, and we could cover greater distances than our ancestors did, and we could do it faster.

Suddenly, there’s nowhere to go. We run into situations these days where nations that are democratic are often split close to 50/50 on decisions, and nobody can leave. No group can get together and form it’s own nation-state, really, because that would require every other nation-state to identify that it is a nation-state.

Nomadic humanity has nowhere to go. We don’t talk about this because there’s quite simply nowhere to go. We can’t go anywhere without bumping into other humans, and there’s always some reason that we can’t get along that magically seems to reinforce those borders where people who are dressed the same wearing rubber gloves. There is a ritual to crossing borders, a ritual which has become more and more complex because people find comfort within their boundaries.

You can get political asylum, but the people within the nation-state you’re going to have to agree that you need it.

We have people that have built walls around other people, then complain about how they behave within those walls even if they don’t agree with the way people do things within those walls. That never ends well unless the wall comes down.

What are these borders worth to us? I’m sure I don’t know. They’re worth it to some people.

For now…