Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

Something there is that doesn't love a wall...

The Senate voted last week to put up a fence on our border to the South. The legislation calls for 350 miles of fencing and 500 miles of vehicle barriers. Senator Jeff Sessions, a sponsor of the bill, said "`It sends a signal that open border days are over.'' "Good fences make good neighbors.''

He pulled that last quote, of course, from a poem by one of our greatest American poets, Robert Frost. The poem is called "Mending Wall" and begins "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." It's not the first time I've heard that quote used to support the building of a fence, rather than the tearing down of one. But here it is, out of context again; like a loose stone fallen from a wall, the text has fallen from its poem.

It is certainly ironic that the poem he's quoting by Frost was meant to teach us to question the building of a wall. Old Bob is probably grinding his woodcutting axe somewhere on a farm in the sky right about now. While the wall in Frost's poem is made of stone, it does not keep hunters from passing over, from his land to his neighbor's.

Our own wall will be fence and razor wire, but whether or not it will do as is hoped is just as questionable. A friend of mine was once a security guard at a prison. One day he witnessed an inmate trying to escape past four layers of razor wire fence. The inmate had tied magazines tightly all over his body, but before he made it to the fourth layer he was bleeding to death, several of his limbs having become nearly severed.

Things like this will likely happen on our fence, and though those passing through will be guilty of a crime by law, it is most often a crime of desiring a better life for self and family, which is not a crime we are told, so long as one desires on his side of the fence. "Stay where you are until our backs are turned!" continues the poem.

In Mending Wall, while the stone division is literal, the lesson speaks of a symbolic separation of two neighbors. This wall we are building will be seen by many, and certainly by the world opinion we have increasingly come to ignore, as a symbol consistent with our growing isolation.

Honestly, I'm not sure what the answer is. Illegal immigration is a growing problem, but as to the causes, I'm uncertain. The solution won't be simple though, I'm sure of that. But it's important to really search for more than symbolic answers:

"Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence."

Sometimes it's a good idea to read the whole poem.