Border de-fence

After the "We Need a Fence" project of the "Let Freedom Ring, Inc." corporation (it's real, not irony), which would put a fence between the U.S. and Mexico, Congressman Duncan Hunter has succeeded in getting passage in congress of a plan to study a fence between Canada and the U.S.

It's a shame that after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the new walls being considered are of lesser value to the people living nearby. The Berlin wall was solid and unguarded on the West Berlin side. That gave it huge symbolic value and made it a blank canvas for political graffiti art. It was a tourist attraction, and could be incorporated into daily life. I just finished working on an anti-graffiti by-law, so I shouldn't make it sound attractive, but urban walls are things people have learned to deal with for millenia.

What is now being proposed is a combination of fences, ditches, and pyramids of barbed wire. Besides not being an urban wall, in an environment where walls can be symbolically appropriated, this barbed wire structure will likely be built entirely within the U.S. since neither the Mexican nor the Canadian governments will let it go on their own territory. Both countries end up looking like prison camps.

Just imagine for a minute a fence across the Canada-Alaska border. Who will search the migrating caribou herds lining up at the border checkpoints, and tend to their wounds as the poor animals get stuck in the barbed wire? How are you going to string a fence across mountains and glaciers? Maybe they won't build a fence there, but simply have border controls for anyone coming from Alaska to the continental U.S.

Mending Wall

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 even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
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."

References

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