There is no such thing as an impenetrable wall. That is an axiom that has come to us from the dawn of time. And yet we learn nothing from history and we continue into a foggy future, dragging our silly trust in walls as a tombstone around our necks. Whether dealing with the walls of ancient Babylon or the wall at Toronto’s G20 summit, we only divide the good people. We only challenge the bad.
The truth is that weak and foolish people build walls. Since ancient times, the weak have built walls to defend themselves from their neighbours while the strong have built alliances. Those ancient walls fell to dust while alliances built empires.
Walls are too easily beaten by weight of numbers or by stealth. They fall to the ravages of pestilence and starvation. Walls can crumble in economic failure. They are defeated by tunnelling and through the air. They are vanquished by siege machines and by trickery. No walls are safe. Every wall has a gate and there is where it is at its weakest.
People in gated communities today live with the same falsehoods that fooled the lord of the manor with his castle keep. A gated community is an insult to neighbours with a false sense of prestige, strength and security.
The Nazis built a wall around the Warsaw Ghetto and yet the occupants of that ghetto held off one of the fiercest armies in the world for almost a month. The Russians build a wall across an occupied Berlin. We watched it crumble in the reality of glasnost. The Israelis call their wall on the West Bank a barrier. Have they forgotten what their hero Joshua did to the barriers of Jericho?
We built a wall in Toronto’s downtown to pen the G20 Summit attendees and kept them from seeing a friendly, clean and open city. That wall attracted the anarchists and the crazies, the law breakers and the protestors, the civil-rights advocates and the concerned, the curious and the questioners. They came like moths to a flame. They were indiscriminately trapped and beaten and unlawfully imprisoned in a brutal, out-of-control police deception and sting that has shamed Canadians for years to come. And nobody ever tested the stupid wall in Toronto’s downtown.
America is building walls today along its northern and southern borders to keep out people from Canada and Mexico. The walls are just an inconvenience to America’s enemies. They are turning away their friends.
It is neither the height of your wall that matters, nor is it the choice between razor or barbed wire on top. Nor can it be the modern sensors or combinations of deterrents that matter. You can build better walls but it will always be the ones you tear down that build better friendships.
– 30 –
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]