This is a look at walls, and what I think about them

I recently read an article in Texas Monthly talking about the wall our government is building along our border and it just never ceases to amaze me how our government is so reactionary. It also points out to me that nothing good comes when decisions are made from or in a committee. Folks have been building walls since the dawn of time, fencing in our livestock to sustain life I suspect is where it started but a fence serves the same purposes as a wall. There have even been, in more recent times, walls built as memorials and even as pieces of art.

I do not think the wall along our southern border with Mexico is really art but one Frenchman shot it in a way that almost says it is beautiful. I love great photographs, I do. They capture a moment in time and depending on the equipment and methodology used a truly magnificent piece can be created. Seems that Maurice Sherif, a French photog has published some pictures in “The American Wall” which they say is an outright attack on the wall. They say reading the essays will inform you and are against the building the wall but when you look at the photo’s they are indeed truly beautiful.

How can we put this dichotomy together, a tragic story of isolationism and some really incredible pieces of art depicting the same thing. Seems strange to me really that we are building a wall along the border to begin with.

We can scroll through history, recent and ancient, and find examples of failed wall systems. We can look at the Wailing Wall, the famous Jewish religious site located in the Old City of Jerusalem that was created by Herod the Great in 19BC. That wall did not start out as a holy site that folks make a pilgrimage to. The Great Wall of China was built, rebuilt, and maintained between the 5th century BC and the 16th century to protect the northern borders of the Chinese Empire from the attacks of nomadic tribes from the north. That wall meant little to Mongol hoards, they befriended the wall builders and got in anyway. We also have Hadrian’s Wall, which was built by the Romans to protect their colony Britannia from the tribes in Scotland. 73 miles of wall across the north of England that was another wall building folly, over 9000 roman soldiers garrisoned along the wall, that today is little more than an archeological oddity.

If we scroll up a little closer in time, we can look at the Maginot Line built by the French after getting their asses handed to them in WWI by the Germans. Leading up to WWII they started building a wall, with serious fortifications, along the German border. When the blitzkrieg got rolling the Germans simply went through Belgium and the Netherlands as well as through the Ardennes Forest which was north of the main defenses and whooped their asses again. Keep that last sentence in mind as I will come back to that. So in 1961 when the cold war was heating up, the Berlin wall went up. That boondoggle was a desperate but effective move by East Germany to stop East Berliners escaping from the Soviet-controlled East German state. A stupid wall that many lost their lives over. I have a piece of that wall that my Mom got for me when she visited Germany, taking a small hammer and breaking off a chunk for me.

There are however some walls that are good, the American Immigrant Wall of Honor for example.

This wall is tracking the 17 million that have immigrated to the United States through Ellis island.

There is also the Veterans Memorial wall in DC, a tribute to the 58,195 Military that made the ultimate sacrifice for their country during the Vietnam War. That is a powerful piece of art blended with history and if you have not taken the trip to sit a stare at that wall for a while please do, it speaks a powerful message. That wall is the quintessential example of a wall as art.

There is also the Chewing Gum Wall in San Luis Obispo as another example of art. “Bubblegum Alley” is a local tourist landmark in downtown. That one is kinda gross to me but I do feel it is art and should be respected as such.

The Lennon Wall in Prague is another such example of art in wall form. The Lennon Wall was once a normal wall but since the 1980s it has been filled with John Lennon-inspired graffiti and pieces of lyrics from Beatles songs. I would like to see that someday.

So we have all these example of walls, used for different things. The ones that were walling people in or walling people out were all abject failures, history tells us as much. I just listed a few, there are MANY, MANY more examples. So I am not sure how building a wall along the border went from concept to reality. I know it involved our elected representatives in Washington, I suppose that is all that needs to be said about that. These dunderheads who represent us have decided to spend an ass load of money building a wall and for what? They are obviously not students of history, walls to keep folks in place do not work. But here we are building walls, probably more for the pork barrel spending in those districts than anything else.

It is, and will be, like the Maginot Line. A disconnected set of walls, with openings here and there, that will let the boogie men in anyway - when they want in. Instead of fixing the problems with immigration, something harder than they can understand, our government has decided to build walls instead. I know there are valid concerns for the security of the border, seems most of the “brew-ha-ha” lately has revolved around the drug gangs operating along the border. That is a Mexican problem that did not exist before because the Mexican government was paid handsomely to “looked the other way”. They gave up on trying to control the flow of drugs, and in return the gangsters kept the violence to a minimum and did not draw undue attention. The new regime does not feel that way, undoubtedly due to pressure from the United States to crack down on the “War on Drugs”.

I am not sure what the answer is, but it does not (or should not) take anyone long to see that building a 25 foot tall wall along parts of the border is not the answer. What is this wall costing to build? What will it cost to maintain? What will the costs be in human lives? For the wall in Germany, the costs were too high on all fronts.

So I say to you Mr. President, tear down this wall