Imagine there's no countries/it's...quite difficult, actually.

I experienced an odd juxtaposition of thoughts today, as I was driving home from town.  The radio was giving me the news of an attempted coup-de-etat in Turkey.  A commentator noted that one of the problems facing the current PM was a persistent secessionist group, the PKK, that wants to establish a Kurdish homeland, a state whose geography corresponds to the ethnicity of its citizens.  Fine, I thought.  Borders, when you get right down to it, are kind of stupid.  Why should a Turk in Istambul even want to exercise political control over a bunch of people who want nothing to do with him, away over in Silopi?  What good does such a line on a map do anybody?  Why do we make such a fuss over borders anyway?  If Jorge wants to live and work over there, and Miryam wants to live and work yonder, who even cares?

As I was imagining these pleasingly Lennon-esque thoughts, I passed the airport.  The flags, as happens all too often these days, were at half-staff, whether for slain policemen in Dallas or the dozens of murdered in Nice, I don't know.  But, despite what I was thinking about the stupidness of national borders, my first reaction on seeing the flag display was "hey...the flag of the United States is lower than the state flag and the other flag.  That's just wrong!"