Barbed wire is very annoying. Pieces of land are marked with it. Fences are experienced to keep people from fleeing or entering. Prisons are bordered with it.
Man has wrapped himself in barbed wire, or worse in razor wire. An unconscious self-flagellation. People who want to invade our territory we keep out with it. Refugees are enclosed or excluded with it. Man has become an irritable animal. Afraid of her fellow earthlings. Strangers are excluded as if they are aliens from another planet.
Right-wing populism dehumanizes those people by feeding fear and hatred of the strange. Being different is surrounded by lack of knowledge and unfamiliarity with the other cultures and customs.
We wrap ourselves in barbed wire and razor wire to protect ourselves from the foreign. We enclose ourselves, reducing the earth to a bulwark of universal alienation. Barbed wire and walls. Words and political polarization. Lies and twisting the facts. Barbed wire is everywhere, even between neighbors in cities.
We have wrapped ourselves in barbed wire it causes pain everywhere while we accuse the other of being the cause of that pain. Pain that keeps getting worse and worse and against which there is no medicine.
Barbed wire excites the distortion of the strange. Ideally, we would like to wrap everything that is strange with barbed wire…
