Yesterday I sat in a lecture hall while someone preached his success story to a bunch of zoned-out college students. It was a slightly interactive presentation; he gave each of us a flashcard and asked us to envision what it would be like to win Powerball and spend the next six months purchasing whatever we wanted. “Now write down what you would live for after you had everything you wanted,” he said.
Once again I pondered a question similar to the ones I’ve been asking myself since my first year in college. I rattled off a familiar list—traveling, running, reading, dancing, helping others, friends and family, even love. It’s pretty generic in these terms but the list doesn’t have to be specific to understand what they all have in common. I am passionate about movement, and everyone having the chance to move through life as they please.
This sounds like a pipe-dream that John Lennon would sing about, I know. Our world is constantly moving and the planet’s movement is out of our control, yet people have always regulated the movements of others to maintain order. Our ethics and personal morals are all designed around restricting people’s movements because they choose to dance on the line rather than walk the “straight and narrow”. Somewhere in our psychological history some movements became good and bad; we talk about key political and historical events as movements. But have we gone too far with the restrictions?
When humans started to settle they began to lay claim to the land that they had adapted to best. Like other animals they were competing for the resources, so territories became a way to reduce competition, but that change may have also augmented conflict. I always think of Pocahontas, in the Disney movie, when she sings “Colors of the Wind.” She starts, “You think you own whatever land you land on, that the earth is just a dead thing you can claim.” On both sides people said, “This is not yours.” But any way we really try to justify that is constructed by human thought. The most natural thing our species does is move around.
We continue the conversation with “You don’t belong here.” But why? Because we’re scared they may bring harm? What if they are the ones running from just that? This is very evident in our world right now. Each country is regulating movement of refugees differently, and they all have different ideas of what defines a refugee. But what if there were no border regulations? What if people go where they please without being told the land and its resources are for citizens only? What if we all acted as guests in all parts of the world, rather than pretending to be owners of something that can’t be held in two hands?
In the United States we abide by the right to freedoms of speech, religion, press, the right to assemble, and the right to petition. We are welcome to move our ideas around, though even that is sometimes censured, but beyond the borders even those no longer apply. According to John Locke the natural freedoms of all humans are the rights to life, liberty, and property. (The U.S. amended the third one to “pursuit of happiness”). To me the majority of the issues we face stems from the right to property, particularly in terms of land. Would things progress differently if we had the right to life, liberty, and movement? Where we hale from is such an important aspect of our identities, I propose that if we didn’t have to tether ourselves down to one place in order to acquire a passport, our perceptions of one another and our treatment of the world would be radically different. In a world that is integrated on a global scale maybe all that is left is to drop the restrictions that make it hard for people get out of where they feel stuck and adopt the lives they truly want to have. We say that you can be anyone you want to be, but in terms of heritage and race (which still very much factors in) we still keep adjusting physical and metaphorical boundaries to keep people out of certain spaces and trapped in others. Maybe during another point in time this type of change was inconceivable, and fulfilling it in its entirety definitely still is, but maybe allowing for some more controlled chaos rather than strict order may lead the world to focus less negativity.
There are people who physically can’t run, jump, flip, and skip. For those of us who can we don’t construct our world with those unable to in mind, and restrict their freedom to move. It is not just those with disabilities that we marginalize. Any marginalized group feels restricted mobility, whether it is physical, economic, or social. These restrictions lead to feelings of entrapment and paralysis which lead to anger and violence. Mobility is at the center of our existence, even though I cannot afford everything I want, I don’t take my mobility foregranted. It probably takes more energy to fret about people having more opportunities to move through the world than to equalize and inflate each person’s quality of life. We all need to invest more time into valuing bodies and minds that allow us to accomplish so much on a global scale, but also focus on that of others and recognize that with our mobility there comes a responsibility as well. We need to strengthen the global community that values freedom of movement, because that is a group in which we can all take part.
