Trying not to think about border walls these days requires effort akin to domestic violence hostages attempting to ignore both the gunman inside and the SWAT team outside. With each passing day, this government shut-down holds more of us hostage in some way, even as the likely cost of cleaning up afterward, wall or no wall, has likely surpassed the contested sum that triggered the stand-off.
Ever since we ventured out of our caves, human beings have built walls. Ancient cities walled themselves in so people could sleep at night without raiders from rival cities coming to seize their wealth and women and set the place ablaze. Trouble was, if your neighbors had enough patience, they simply camped outside. Your fortress then became a prison. When your food and water ran out, your captors got what they wanted.
Today, we make our cities accessible as possible so barbarian nomads can come spend their money as tourists. When they seek to stay, start a business, or work in our restaurants and fields, we balk. Hence, building boundary walls has accelerated in our era. At the end of World War II, the world had seven functional border walls or fences. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the number had risen to 15. Today, United Nations monitors identify 77 such barriers.
Finland has a 450-mile fence to keep reindeer from wandering across the border into Russia. (Who knew reindeer emigration was a problem? Is Santa Claus Finnish, and cruel to the help?) France, Morocco, Spain, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey have barriers of various lengths meant to keep out migrants or terrorists. The U.K. doesn’t need a wall because the North Sea serves as its moat. Isolationists think it needs Brexit, however, to help keep swarthy foreigners out. Belfast, Northern Ireland, still has its “peace walls” that separate Catholic Irish nationalist and Protestant Loyalist neighborhoods, while Israel has 400 serpentine miles of a 20-foot wall, partly to keep Palestinians and Israelis apart, but also to control Palestinians’ movements and activities.
Proponents of all these barriers claim they “work.” Numbers of strangers among us and incidents of trouble grow more slowly. Nevertheless, it seems self-evident that building walls in our high-tech age is not only an act of desperation but a testament to human failure. If people on both sides of all these walls could see each other as human beings like themselves rather than soulless infidels or parasitic vermin, and if they could sit at table to share food and listen carefully to each other’s stories, we would have no need of walls. Such a vision surely seems like naïve dreaming to some, but it happens on a small scale every day in most all the borderlands where walls and hostilities now divide people. This, too, “works.”
Think, too, what $5 billion, or more likely the $20 billion or so a southwest border wall would eventually cost, could enable if applied to efforts and programs carefully designed to address the social and economic injustices and disasters that chase desperate people toward the land of the free and home of the brave. We’ll spend the money either way, but at least we wouldn’t have a wall standing by to mock our lack of imagination.
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