Word arrived this week from East Africa that a 65-year-old woman in Kenya has died from the Ebola virus, becoming the country’s second casualty in what authorities fear could become a wider outbreak. The woman had not traveled into the deep interior of the continent herself. Rather, she was infected by a close relative, a man who had recently arrived across the frontier from the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is an awful, agonizing way to die, and anyone with a shred of human decency ought to grieve for that family and pray for the health workers now tracing contacts through the dust and heat.
Yet for those of us watching from a few thousand miles away, sitting at the counter of a diner where people still talk about practical things like the cost of groceries and the state of the county roads, the news carries a familiar, chilling resonance. It serves as an unsparing reminder of a truth our modern political class spends an awful lot of energy trying to unlearn: borders are not arbitrary lines drawn by petty men, but the very first wall of defense a civilization possesses against chaos, misery, and disease.
The story out of Kenya is old as time. A traveler moves from an area where a deadly contagion festers, slips past whatever cursory checkpoints exist, and brings the sickness home to his kin. Pathogens do not possess passports, and they care nothing for the high-minded rhetoric of the globalists who gather in European conference halls to proclaim that humanity has evolved past the nation-state. Viruses are ruthlessly materialist. They move when people move, and they stop only when a physical boundary, enforced by real authority, stands in their path.
Edmund Burke famously remarked that society is a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead and those who are to be born. That partnership rests entirely upon order. When a government cannot, or will not, manage the movement of individuals across its perimeter, it abdicates the most basic term of that social contract. The primary purpose of political power is not to re-engineer society or lecture citizens on their moral shortcomings; it is to keep the peace and protect the community from foreign perils, whether those perils arrive carrying rifles or microscopic threads of ribonucleic acid.
We have seen this movie before, of course. Whenever a contagion begins to stir in a distant corner of the globe, the instinct of the coastal managerial elite is to downplay the utility of travel restrictions. We are told by international bureaucrats that screening is ineffective, that limiting transit is somehow parochial or economically backwards, and that we must instead rely on global cooperation and seamless international logistics. But when the fever actually strikes, those very same bureaucrats inevitably run for their own barricades, leaving ordinary, working families to shoulder the disruption and the fear.
Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo have distinct economies, distinct capacities, and a complex history of regional migration. Managing a long and porous border in central Africa is no easy task, and no reasonable observer would claim that stopping a virus in its tracks is simple work. But the principle remains unchanged whether you are talking about the Great Lakes region of Africa or the southern border of the United States. A nation that treats its borders as purely theoretical suggestions is a nation living on borrowed time, inviting calamity through the front parlor door.
Out here in the American interior, folks do not need an advanced degree in public administration to understand the mechanics of self-preservation. You lock your front door at night not because you despise the travelers walking along the road, but because you have an absolute, non-negotiable obligation to protect the people asleep under your roof. The moment our leaders forget that fundamental duty in favor of borderless sentimentality, they forfeit the trust of the governed.
The tragic passing of a grandmother in Kenya ought to focus minds in Washington, London, and every other capital where the ruling class has grown careless about sovereignty. We must offer whatever material aid and technical expertise we can muster to help our neighbors abroad contain such horrors. But above all, we must resolve to keep our own house in order, to maintain our own watchtowers, and to remember that the hard borders of a nation remain the best shield ordinary people have ever known.