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America is losing ground, literally and figuratively. For decades, I’ve taught young people how the United States was born - and how it expanded to the configuration on the maps I use to teach - the lower forty-eight with Alaska and Hawaii scrunched in alongside. The maps don’t indicate how tenuous our hold on the territory within that familiar shape is becoming, but it’s getting weaker. That’s ominous - not only for us, but for the whole world. In spite of several warnings not to, I drove to the Mexican border in Nogales, Arizona last June, right after school got out. (See previous articles here and here.)

Ordinary people I met in Tucson told me it was dangerous down there, but I went anyway and stopped when I got to the pathetic border fence where I pulled over and parked on a Monday afternoon. Half the signs were in Spanish. Hispanic men were sitting in groups of three or four on the sidewalks watching me get out of my car and walk around. The first several people I tried to talk to didn’t speak English - and I was still in the United States.

I walked into the Nogales Historical Society next to a pawn shop. The man behind the desk in the office didn’t speak English. Another man came in and he didn’t speak English either. Exhibits favorable to Mexican bandits and revolutionaries proliferated.

Seeing a McDonalds on a hill nearby and knowing they had wifi service, I drove up. Nobody spoke English there either and it was surrounded by a chain link fence topped with razor wire. Remember, I was still on the US side of the border, which I could see from the parking lot. Private homes had bars on their windows.

Those, and the security fence reminded me of traveling in the West Bank three years ago. I left my car and walked across into Mexico. There were no clerks to challenge me, just a one-way turnstyle because nobody tries to sneak into that godforsaken country, and no wonder: A week later 21 people were massacred just 12 miles away. I didn’t feel safe in a country where the government is as corrupt as the drug lords. Two blocks in was a hotel outside of which were heavily-armed soldiers guarding government officials meeting inside. After an hour of being accosted by men selling viagra and prostitutes, I turned around.