Surely, being enrolled in Global Citizens, we actively bring up being a global citizen but never closely discuss it. Within the last week, we have been required to read Judith Butler’s Frames of War, relating it to Extremely Loud & Incredibly Loud by Jonathan Foer and the events that took place on 9/11. Although 9/11 was a worldwide event, it was largely only a national crisis in the U.S. (understandably) and it didn’t effect citizens globally, but nationally. It’s the boundaries that lie between global and national— although they do not have to be literal boundaries— that change our perspectives towards any given situation. Butler writes “The boundary of who I am is the boundary of the body, but the boundary of the body never fully belongs to me… But as much as the body, considers as social in both its surface and depth, is the condition of survival, it is also that which, under certain social conditions, imperils our lives and our survivability” (54). Survival doesn’t depend on the literal boundary of one’s self but it’s the social power of existence in the body, containing not only physical characteristics but also deep in the mind and the soul.

Unfortunately, according to Butler, “one’s body is never fully one’s own…” but if we make up a world of body-less bodies, then there would be a world-wide effort to find one’s self. The body and the self come from survival which derives from the social world, space, and time. The vulnerability and sacrifice of exposure to others outweigh the option to be self-less, creating a beneficial portrayal to life itself. Butler writes “Life s sustained not by a self-preserving drive, conceived as an internal impulse of the organism, but by a condition of dependency without which survival proves impossible” (46). It is the dependencies we put on each other and on ourselves to create life. If we cannot have complete control of ourselves, we then by default have some control over others, creating an inter-web of dependencies, nationally and globally.