As a boy, I spent many afternoons and evenings shooting baskets at the end of my driveway. Invariably, these shootarounds would at some point result in the ball bouncing over my neighbor’s fence (a result I attribute more to the layout of my driveway than to the waywardness of my jumpshot). To continue my game, I would sometimes alert the neighbors and ask them to retrieve my ball. More often, I would climb over the fence, but most often, I would kick a board out and climb through the fence. Now, as a homeowner (and fence owner), I can see that this practice of kicking out the fence was a nuisance for my neighbors who, on more than one occasion, had the demolished boards replaced.
My family’s relationship with these neighbors was cool at best. At no point did they confront me about the missing boards or discuss with my family ways that we could work together to salvage their fence and my basketball game. Ultimately, and without notice, my neighbors constructed a taller fence with wiring specifically designed to keep my ball on my driveway. This was their final attempt to solve the problem – let’s learn to live together by allowing ourselves to live apart.
Throughout history, fences have been used to solve problems in the most rudimentary of ways – by placing physical barriers that could limit interactions with the world beyond the walls. The most famous wall, the Great Wall of China, prevented raiders from escaping with much more than their own lives. In modern times, the Berlin Wall prevented East Germans from escaping the oppressive regime by which they were governed. In Berlin, walls were necessary because East German ideas were losers – if you can’t convince others that your view is correct, simply prevent them from leaving.
The reason walls are on my mind these days is that the United States seems to have gotten itself into the international wall-building business. On the American border with Mexico and in the violence-ridden streets of Baghdad, we are resorting to the wall, the most rudimentary of problem solving tools.
Last month, having exhausted quite a few military strategies to quell sectarian violence in Baghdad, American soldiers began construction of a 12-foot-high, 3-mile-long wall separating a historic Sunni enclave from Shiite neighborhoods. I am not qualified to say whether the wall is a good idea for policing a civil war (and the plans are reportedly on hold after complaints from the Iraqi prime minister), but it is certainly telling that four years after declaring “Mission Accomplished,” so heavy-handed a strategy is necessary.
Meanwhile, in our own country, rather than coming up with a real strategy to address the issue of immigration that led to the mass immigrant demonstrations of last spring, the best the government has come up with is a massive wall along the border with Mexico. Again, I cannot comment on the law enforcement wisdom of erecting this wall, but I am saddened that this is the best policy we can imagine for dealing with immigration.
Walls may be useful for law enforcement, but they are generally a symptom of a failure (or perhaps a lack of attempt) of other methods of solving problems. When my neighbors built a higher fence to contain my errant jumpers, they were taking unilateral action to protect their own property without regard for confronting the root of the problem, namely, me. Rather than doing the delicate work of asking me to refrain from destroying their fence, they simply raised their fence and figured the problem would go away.
Similarly, building walls as public policy foregoes the difficult work of immigration reform or inter-religious mediation, replacing it with a blunt and impenetrable impediment. Typically, complex public problems require thoughtfulness, vision, and compromise that can lead to complex solutions. Unfortunately, our country, like my neighbors, seems to be out of the thoughtfulness business and into the wall-building business.
No comments:
Post a Comment