Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall

    
 

     “Good fences make good neighbors,” is often quoted from Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall.” Frost concludes otherwise as he writes: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.“…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 offense.  Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.”

     Does a fence create a good neighbor? Is my neighbor any more good on one side of an imaginary line or less so when there is no obstruction in between? This is the classic question described in the Gospel of Luke’s parable of the Good Samaritan.

Fences are built out of fear and loathing.  Like the Levite in the parable, his fence is not physical. It is a pseudo-spirituality bordering upon arrogance and pride, a fear of becoming “unclean” by touching the wounds of a man left for dead.

      And so we build a $49 Billion Dollar fence of flesh and metal along the U.S.-Mexico Border. Why?  Because we fear war with Mexico? Or do we fear something else? The standard answers are: to stop illegal immigration, stop drugs, and stop terrorism. Not one of those has been attenuated. I and everyone else, personally, let the fence be built out of fear. Our country bares an immense corporate sin on its soul. The sin? We allowed fear from a visceral reaction to the tragedy of 9/11 to prevail.

     Now that all the post 9/11 fear has for the most part disappeared, what is it do we really fear from Mexico that we do not fear from our neighbor, Canada? What we fear and loath from Mexico is the poverty that crosses from the desert into our temples god named Prosperity – this god is jealous and demands by law that there is not enough of him to be shared. If prosperity comes not from “grace”, then it is becomes an idol. We bow to such idols in the nooks and crannies of our public policies designed to carve into the very hearts of human beings regardless of origin. Integrity is in the human hearts made of flesh and all hearts belong to God.

     St. Paul writes: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal 3:28)  That fence to the Mexican says: “You do not belong here. You are poor. Go back to your poverty. If you come here, you will make me poor.” The manifestation of great arrogance and pride stretches from Brownsville, Texas to San Diego, California, the length of more than 1,900 miles. We have believed against the advice of the Good Samaritan parable that “good fences indeed make good neighbors.”  Yet, fences didn’t work for the Ming dynasty, they didn’t work for Jericho, they didn’t work for Hadrian, and they didn’t work for the Soviet Union. And since it’s near completion, the Border Fence has only created an illusion of stopping drugs, crime and it certainly did not prevent recent acts of terrorism, shootings in schools, and other horrible symptoms of our internal decadence as a nation, worshipers of a god called money.

St. Paul writes:  “For who makes you (Americans) different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? What you have you did not earn but was given to you by God. You think you are perfect --- you are not…” (1 Corinthians 4:7).

     We must stop unwarrantable deportations, stop incarcerating women and children, stop breaking up families, and stop ignoring our neighbor to the south because of their poverty without seeing their productivity. In the end, we will have imprisoned ourselves out of fear of our benevolent hard working neighbor. And the real enemy continues to be – our fear.

Ronald Reagan once said to Mikhail Gorbachev: “Take down that wall.” To do otherwise is to acquiesce to a great sin of pride. As Frost wrote: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.” Frost may just be referring to God.