| | |  Editorials | Opinions | January 2009 
Be Wary of Those Who Build Walls
 Carl Welser - Livingston Daily
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| Before I built a wall, I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out.
- Robert Frost | |
Entities that build walls are suspicious at best. The construction of a wall around a city or a nation is a reliable sign that larger problems are going untreated.
A wall is not a real solution to a problem. The wall only treats the symptoms of an underlying problem that bears the seeds of many more problems to follow.
China built a wall 2,500 years ago to hold back the hordes of Mongol invaders. The Great Wall of China works better today as a tourist attraction than it ever did as a barricade.
Roman legionnaires built Hadrian's Wall — and three additional walls — across Britannia to thwart incursions by the savage Pictish tribes who lived up north. Hey, that hurts my feelings! Some of those Picts may have been my ancestors up there in Scotland.
A wall separating East and West Berlin was designed to keep people locked in instead of keeping others locked out. When a nation needs to trap its own people, you can be certain there's something dreadfully wrong. Take Cuba, for example.
In other words, I believe walls between people are only symptoms of underlying problems that have not been properly identified and resolved.
Walls take many forms. Simple shrubbery, tidy white pickets, tall wooden slats, woven wire fencing, and wrought iron gratings all work to mark boundaries between neighbors.
Gated communities provide a measure of isolation between neighborhoods. Gates may imply a rash solution to a perceived problem.
There are walls of obvious segregation, and there are walls that even bespeak apartheid. Slowly, ever slowly, the human race works to resolve the underlying problems against which these walls are erected.
I myself am on record — tongue-in-cheek, of course — in recommending that we construct a 1,700-mile wall along our southern border. That's the border running from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, not the Ohio or Indiana border. This wall could be built 50 feet into Mexican territory by laborers who might otherwise cross the border as illegal aliens. Hiring them to stay home and construct this wall might solve perceived problems with migrant workers.
But then, what would we do about the Canadians up north?
Some ancient walls were designed wide enough to allow chariots to run two-abreast atop the wall. If such a wall were built today, it should be wide enough to allow coast-to-coast auto racing. It should also be eye-catching enough to serve as a tourist attraction so people would flock here from China and elsewhere to admire the wall.
The ugly, two-sided tragedy in progress in Gaza has much to do with walls of one kind or another. For centuries, there were teachings about multiple human races. Enlightenment teaches that there is just one human race, and we all belong to it. But just knowing about that unity seems not enough to solve the problem of walls between peoples.
My favorite authority on walls is Robert Frost who wrote a poem about "Mending Walls." Frost and his neighbor would get together every spring to repair winter's damage to the wall that separated their properties.
The neighbor was convinced that good fences make good neighbors. But Frost observed that his apple trees will never wander across the line to eat the cones under the neighbor's pine trees. In his private thoughts, Frost would like his neighbor to explain exactly why he thinks good fences make good neighbors.
Frost insists, "Before I built a wall, I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out." The neighbor only repeats his mantra, "Good fences make good neighbors."
I'm aware of the fences that arise quickly between people who feel their resources are being challenged. It is human nature to build walls where walls seem necessary.
I actually enjoy being generous to other motorists. It gives me great pleasure to stop short of a driveway when traffic is thick on a road like Grand River Avenue and wave a waiting driver to pull out of a blocked driveway and enter the flow of traffic ahead of me. It costs me virtually nothing to be so generous; maybe a couple of seconds of my day.
A friendly wave from the affected motorist doubles the pleasure.
On the other hand, if any motorists trapped in a driveway leading to the main road edges forward far enough to challenge my territorial rights to that little strip of highway, I don't respond happily. I am willing to give generously but not sacrificially on someone else's terms. I can feel the wall quickly rising between us.
A nasty gesture from a thwarted challenger brings its own sense of fulfillment. I am, after all, only human. Roundabouts make for grand theaters of gesture.
A good friend who works daily with people from many walks of life advises this: "Look not with the eyes of my head, but look instead with the eyes of my heart."
I think he may be right. The eyes of the heart see things that the eyes in the head cannot see. The eyes of the heart can see right through walls.
Carl Welser is a minister, a former firefighter with the Hamburg Fire Department and a regular columnist in the Daily Press & Argus. You can send e-mail to him at cwelser(at)sbcglobal.net. |
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