How does one go about putting out the fire in one’s hair while listening to some idiot defend a “no border wall” rule for one’s country?
I kindly repeat a line from our rustic friends: “It oughta be a law ‘gin stupid.”
The story of walls is intriguing: the “Great Wall” of China, Hadrian’s wall, the Berlin Wall, the modern Israeli wall, but THE WALL which currently produces the ocean of vitriol is the one proposed on America’s southern border.
We are told by the left that we shouldn’t cringe behind walls, living in isolation and fear; we should fearlessly, and lovingly, move out from behind our walls and embrace, well, whatever walks in.
In fact, your life and mine are, in every way, literally defined by walls of one sort or another, even if we are the freest human on the planet. There are the walls of your own living space—your house. If the no-wallers are right, do we really need them? And “walls” called doors? If you’re serious, take them off tonight and lie down to pleasant dreams, free and unrestricted and unafraid, embracing your freedom. Have you a fence about your property? What a waste of time, effort and money and what a frank declaration of your fear-stricken pathetic little life.
You are a young mom and you have three caterwauling (i.e., normal) sprouts running through your house, and you don’t want bathroom walls?
Most operating rooms I have ever seen are seriously walled spaces. Hotel walls? Sports walls? Driving “walls?” Movie walls? Study walls? Zoo walls? Ranch “walls?” Prison walls? Et cetera, ad infinitum.
None of that speaks of the unseen walls inside of which our treasured liberties are found: the wall of police protection, the wall of our military, the endless walls of our national Constitution (what is it, at bottom, but a compendium of walls within which we are privileged to live out our lives?), the walls of our innermost thoughts, our psychical and spiritual life. (“Oh, no problem; I open all the doors of my soul to everyone; feel free to walk in wherever and whenever you wish in your hob-nailed boots!) Your cranium? A tough and necessary wall, I should think.
You and I don’t possess a single solitary liberty of any kind which does not, by definition, involve a wall of one sort or another.
Our ex-president’s calm and assuring, almost pastoral, words pleading with us to abandon our walls was speaking, specifically, about that aforementioned literal wall on our southern border, a wall designed to prevent uncounted hordes from entering, and a wall which he and his leftist friends demonstrably detest.
None of what I have written here represents a plea for a national anti-immigration policy. The historic fact is that America has allowed more immigrants into our country than any nation in human history. We allow more than a million new legal immigrants in every single year. Perhaps we could and should allow several more millions into the country annually. That would be an interesting conversation. What I am arguing here is that to say that 7.4 billion people should feel free to walk in at any time they wish, and that we should welcome them, feed, clothe and house them is provable idiocy. It is, in fact, expressive of a deep hatred for America, and a wish for its demise. Will someone please name a nation which does not—for all the obvious reasons—have borders? If you ask why Europe’s nation-killing non-wall policy doesn’t bother the left, the answer is: Europe is what they want here. They lust for Europe on American soil. Belgium writ large!
Robert Frost has that hauntingly beautiful line which opens his “Mending Walls:” “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Well, yes and no! Walls may, at times, be painful to our kinder sensibilities, but the brutal fact is: to be fenceless is to be defenseless. Frost’s sentiment touches something essentially human in our psyche, but so does the sentence his pragmatic neighbor continues to say in response to him: “Fences make good neighbors.” Maybe both are right. While pondering that issue, I say build the wall.
Oh, and, for the record: the place of greatest freedom ever imagined is heaven, with its impenetrable wall, a wall that does what all walls do—keep bad things out and good things in.
Bill Anderson
Grapevine, Texas