I have an issue with Democrats and their acceptance of the frame “border security”. Security implies and supports the conservative concept: “Americans good, Latinx bad”. Used as it is most often, security is a military term, as in: send troops there, establish and secure a perimeter. i.e. don’t let anyone in besides us and use force if necessary. Used as a social term security can mean someone who arbitrarily decides who can enter a nightclub or concert and who to remove from those venues, often by violence.

I prefer the term border protection. I hear it used as a descriptive or supportive phrase from all sides but only ancillary to the metaphor “Border Security”. As a primary metaphor “border protection” implies and supports the progressive idea that the border should be safe, protected from bad people who want to get in and hurt us but also safe for people whose home country was unsafe. Morally they deserve protection too.

It is known that advances in technology continue to make the border safer and the billions of dollars required for a wall is a waste of taxpayers money. That money can be better used for the numerous personnel needed to expeditiously process refugee claims and the modern technology used to interdict people and contraband coming in through our seaports and airports.

One might say that people aren’t consciously aware of any difference between those words but unconsciously they do and decisions about what words mean are made unconsciously, informed by experience and repetition. Just as in the difference between regulation and protection when used regarding government monitoring of business, protection is the word that speaks more to those without power while security and regulation are words about the use of power by those who have it. The difference is subtle but significant. How those words are defined by society can easily be influenced.

We have all heard that words have power. But what is it exactly that bestows them with this power? Words are like icons on a computer desktop. The icon contains no information of it’s own. It only points to and connects us to a file or folder in storage that contains the information the user associates with that icon. Words are icons that connect us to where the real information is stored in the brain.

Our brains have to process billions of bits of information daily. Because of this the brain needs to take shortcuts. One word can connect us to entire concepts. Consider the word baseball. Not only does it connect you to a small round object but to a stadium and bats and uniforms and umpires and balls and strikes and beer vendors etc.

But an icon will only connect us to one file or folder and a word will only connect us to one definition or one collection of related things. It cannot connect us to two unrelated files at the same time. When you hear the word baseball you will not see a hockey puck. When we want to use the information found on a particular file we recall the icon associated with the info, click it, and the information appears. No matter how many times you click the icon for rock and roll it will not take you to jazz.

Persuading folks that a word means something different than you think it means is as easy as getting your definition to the top of the Google search results. You repeat it over and over again. Eventually the Google brain decides that the other definition is correct and yours is wrong. Google doesn’t know right from wrong nor does it care. So the wrong answer easily becomes the answer you find when you ask..

This is why using words like security and regulation over and over again to describe refugees claiming asylum will connect people to using our power to keep everyone out with a wall and assault rifles instead of using our power to determine who can enter and who cannot. It won’t matter which idea is right. It only matters which one people say is right. In this scenario getting society to accept that our real job is to protect those involved will not be easy. It will be very difficult. Getting your information to the top of the Google search isn’t easy.

Words do have power and we must use that power to help all peoples, as our American moral values dictate.