A border drawn neatly can cut through lives that were never arranged so neatly.

Lines on a map are drawn at a scale where people are invisible. A clean division makes administrative sense from above and then lands on farms, families, markets, and daily walks that were organised by geography rather than by politics. The neatness is a property of the drawing, not of the place. Anything decided at a distance will tidy away something it cannot see.

Where you make a decision that covers many people, find one case at the edge and check what happens to it. A boundary always looks reasonable from wherever it was drawn.