Some thoughts on borders and walls.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps. . .*

Has it occurred to anyone else that a militarized border between the United States and Mexico means not only a more efficient means of keeping people out, but a way of keeping people in?

People react so nonchalantly to the notion of a militarized border that it's clear they've never seen one.  I've seen a lot of them, having traveled across Eastern Europe in the late 80s.  I've had my passport picture scrutinized because I was wearing my glasses instead of my contacts.   I've sat in my compartment listening to guards search every inch of the silent train for stowaways.   I was once detained at an East German border crossing when I went to accompany my boyfriend to a train.  I didn't have my passport, because I wasn't going anywhere.  (I argued my way out of that one, in case you're wondering.)

And then I lived within militarized borders for an entire year.

Before I moved to Berlin, I wondered how it would feel to have the Wall so close around.  Once there, I discovered that the western part of Berlin was enormous.  You could conduct your daily business without ever encountering the Wall.  You could, at times, very nearly forget about it.  Nearly.

But even in those last days of the Cold War, we knew that in a moment the Russians could pull those borders together and close them, like a drawstring closes a bag.  And there we'd be, "a cat in a sack," as the Germans liked to say.  This was not something you wanted to think about if you liked to sleep at night.

---

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

The declared purpose of the Wall was not to keep East Germans in, but supposedly to keep us evil capitalists out. The official name for the Wall in East Germany was "die antifaschistische Schutzmauer," "the antifascist wall of protection."  The truth was revealed on a regular basis.  People jumping over the wall from the western side to the east (there were some; not many) were imprisoned, occasionally in mental institutions, and then sent back, sometimes followed by a bill to West Germany for the cost of their upkeep.  Whereas people leaving in the other direction were shot.  Dead.

Perhaps I'm overreacting, but it's worth noting that some of these "protective" measures start out small.  Even the Berlin Wall didn't begin as a real wall.  In the night between August 12th and 13th, 1961, soldiers and barbed wire appeared along the the border between East and West Berlin.  On that day you could still cross the border in one energetic leap, and some guards did, running, jumping, reaching the Western embrace on the other side.  Soon, concrete blocks and mortar were added.  Over the years the technology of the Wall was refined, until the border reached its final form.  There was the Wall of the photographs,  concrete mixed with asbestos and a rounded top fashioned of wide pipe.  Behind it came the death strip: the raked sand with trip wires, the anti-vehicular barriers, and then, finally, the second Wall that few saw, more of a fence than anything, but impossible to scale.  Cat:  meet sack.

Not far from where I lived, in extreme southwestern Berlin, a wooden viewing platform stood next to the Wall.  From its height you saw not East Berlin, but Kleinmachnow, a quiet, formerly elegant suburb.  We liked to climb up there when we were drunk, and watch the sun come up over Karl Marx Street.  I would sit and marvel at the odd arbitrariness of it all, and think of the irony of the line, Good fences make good neighbors.  Then I'd go home and go to sleep.

The Wall was a mere sixty miles of border, very short by American standards. Yet by the late 1980s, when I was living within its confines on the Western side, some parts of it were in poor repair.  On one trip to another outlying suburb, I could look through a hole to the other side.  But looking is a far cry from crossing.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall.  Time, entropy, and sometimes free energy, too.  (The weed that splits a stone.) It takes resources to build a wall, and more than people realize to maintain one.  Before you build a wall, you might ask to know what the costs of maintenance are, both fiscal and human.

---

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs.

And then comes the all-important question: are we walling someone out, or are we being walled in?  During that year in Berlin, it was damned hard to tell the difference at times.  Which is something to think about when our government repeatedly offers us a false choice between our civil liberties and our security, and threatens to put an end to our open society:

He moves in darkness, as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

---------

*All quotes are from Robert Frost's poem, "Mending Wall."

Comments

[Lex]

Interesting meditation.

Now, given that no such wall is planned for the U.S.-Canadian border, over which real terrorists actually have tried to cross into the U.S. (remember the Millennium plot?), should we be happy or afraid?

[Your Hostess]

Calling Margaret Atwood to the white courtesy telephone. . . I thought of working in some quotes from The Handmaid's Tale, where Atwood describes her fictional heroine's attempted flight across a sealed Canadian border.

Yeah, actual measures against actual terrorists--imagine!

How about being calm, yet concerned? ;)

[Lex]

Calm yet concerned don't feed the bulldog. I mean the defense contractors.

[Your Hostess]

Yep, they need a lot of FUD.