I think most of us are familiar with the formula announced by Sigmund Freud that ANATOMY is destiny.  He stated the obvious; only females have the apparatus that leads to mother-hood and the finality of reproduction.  The breasts and nipples on a man are just a shadow of what a woman can do with hers.  But this is about geography as being just about as final as anatomy in the lottery of being born in a place that can be a paradise or a hell.

For those old enough to remember railroad tracks as being the dividing line between the well born and the “others”, destiny in the form of geography pretty well depicted a wall shutting off many more than it allowed in.  These walls or geographical divides are real and this is attested to the current debate in the U.S. about a wall some advocates want to stretch between the U.S. and Mexico.  There is an attraction to the imaginary line that separates the two nations. So many Mexicans and others who take that route from all over the world see a paradise from the Mexican side past the desert and wilderness that must be traversed before you get to the Promised Land.

If you are born sitting on top of a pool of fossil oil, you are geographically determined to get by pretty well off the scraps from an industry that toils to get that oil out of the ground into vehicles and machines and ultimately into the air the world breathes.  If you are born in the area between two rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, that once gave birth to ancient warring civilizations and also produced writing, history and astronomy, you have had the bad luck to be between the juggernaut of two civilizations, the West and the East.  These are simply the Christian West and the Muslim East.  You are what geography dictates.

If you were born in the West you get corn dogs, cheap clothing from Walmart and movies in any format that you want on any of the technological marvels that allow speech, action, business transactions and music to come out of handheld devices probably made by very cheap labor in China and other “Third World” nations. If you were born in the East you probably have no work but are recruited to join causes that want the destruction of Israel AND the West because that western civilization likes to portray naked ladies and are do not respect Muhammad.

If you are born in Israel you are marked for being wiped off the map by countries that have never lifted a finger to raise “Palestinians” out of “refugee” camps erected to house them after 1948.  If you a “Palestinian” you were born in the wrong place at the wrong time and whose geography forces you into poverty.