Walls

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all of this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action, it is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but murder. - Albert Einstein

I learned today of the U.S. Army's construction of a three mile long wall dividing Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods within the city of Baghdad. I'm not a military strategist, I've never even played a game of "Risk", I didn't play with plastic soldiers when I was a tyke... but i can't help but being struck speechless. Words about stone walls fail me. They seem to me such an ancient component of human existence, a component of our collective history marked by pain, war, death, conquesting emperors, greedy kings, sacrifice, and separation. A barrier between mankind and...mankind? Back in the days of King Arthur and his valiant knights we humans built protective walls around our cities, a security measure to protect against pillaging rogues and raging armies. Given the weapons of the day, the sword and bow, the boiling hot tar and launched boulders, these meters-thick walls provided a sensible barrier from the traitorous outside world. Nowadays the sensibility factor runs thin, and these barricades serve to separate, to contribute to the rift of inequality in our world.


Already having been deeply disturbed by the construction of the "necessary" triple-fortified section of the "Wall of Shame" being built upon 700 miles of the U.S./Mexican border, this bit of news about Baghdad leaves me unnerved. Are we reverting to another Feudal Era in which the kings of our world believe that we must enclose our world in walls in order to remain "secure"? What does the word "secure" refer to? Closing out our perceived enemies, showing them we'd rather spend millions of dollars on concrete and chain link and barbed wire than on creating programs in their country to benefit the poor? Building the wall in Baghdad amidst thousands of people protesting throughout the city crying desperately for the division to STOP? Bush slaps the face of Congress for their attempts at holding his administration accountable for their deception, lies, and greed. Put Mr. President on the defensive and I suppose that's the knee-jerk reaction we should expect to receive. "Oh yeah, look at me now. I can do whatever I want. You think I’m causing civil war and destroying a country? I'll show you civil war."... Mr. Bush would do well to remember the words of his predecessor, Bill Clinton "A world without walls is the only sustainable world... If the world is dominated by people who believe that their races, their religions, their ethnic differences are the most important factors, than a huge number of people will perish in this century." Clinton wasn't perfect, but he recognized the pointless endeavor of imprisoning humans within man-made (and unsupported) confines. Bush's puppetry act becomes more and more translucent as he continues to support policies which lead to the construction of barriers and the deaths of innocent people. Stone by damned stone.


The jackhammers begin to tear away at freedom and block by block a "temporary" barrier appears in our backyard, between neighbors, across Mexico, in Baghdad, pervading our lives. What happens when we become so accustomed to this barrier that we forget its presence, we forget that we were ever truly free to speak of justice and truth and equality, we forget that we were ever allowed to dissent? Will we lose sight of things that once were our unalienable rights as Americans? will we forget? Bush has succeeded in facilitating mind-blowing acts of radical patriotism while creating a society in which we seem to have forgotten our roots. Who are we to morally impose ourselves on other countries? Who are we to say democracy is the only way to live? YES. It could be the most comfortable, safe, and freeing way to live... but does that mean the rest of the world must follow in our footsteps? Has this command been directly handed down by GOD (the one and only true GOD, of course) to Mr. Bush himself to justify a Napoleonic conquest of the world? Does our country as a whole live and breathe by and pray to this same one God our President claims to act under? Are our hands guided by a war-mongering spirit?


From what i know of Americans, I say NO.


Do we line our own suburban neighborhoods with thick cement walls? We cannot be silent and expect peace to pervade the world and to suddenly appear in our government's foreign policy. There are many Americans who have not been silent a single day about the terrible consequences and injustices of the Iraqi War and I thank them from the depths of my heart. There are also Americans like me... who are waking from a slumber rubbing our eyes and wondering "what the HELL happened to our country?" Those of us who claimed to "never get involved" with politics because we didn’t know where to start, scared that once we start to know our hearts will break, and aware that once we have this knowledge we will never be able to step back into our secure bubbles of nightly-news induced reality. We can no longer be numb to the statistics of the dead, unable to see visions of the flag-draped coffins... and yet we continue to be fed self-righteous lies by politicians who claim to be looking out for the lives of our brothers and sisters across the world.


The director of the factory in "Brave New World" (Adolus Huxley) quotes his forefather Our Ford in a frightening statement "History... is bunk".


Have we come to a point that we're so wrapped up in our actions and reactions of the moment that we are unable to look at the past with any type of intelligent reflective thought? Have we removed ourselves so far from reality that we cannot notice the parallels between our current situation and feudal times, times of the Berlin Wall, the Vietnam War? Do any of these historical events ring enough bells to create a fury of action, do they stir our lives enough that we begin to realize that we're the ones who must take responsibility for changing the doomed course of our country's policies? Have we already forgotten the slippery slope that was Vietnam, and how suddenly our boys overseas were being lost by the hundreds and by the thousands, how the death tolls mounted and mounted to a 58,256 name-long black granite cry to the heavens....


I've experienced this monument, this memorial to a generation lost in the jungles of Vietnam. a bitter sob caught in my throat, I wanted to drop to my knees and wail "WHY?" angrily at the skies, to shake the White House on its foundations "WHY WAR?". Blurred eyes searching the heavens for an answer, fingertips tracing letters- each one a prayer of peace on my lips. The Vietnam Wall. Another wall of our history, another wall for which so many boys died needlessly, another wall which divided a country and families and lives forever.


I looked though the iron bars of the White House, choked on my thoughts- it's so small. For the amount of destruction the decisions made within those walls have created, it should be a palace, a small country, a ridiculously giant theme-park adventure complete with flashing neon signs and a "Bombs Over Baghdad" theme park. If one saw the President's lair out of context, it wouldn't be much of a statement of power. I can't bring my mind past it's color- set against a "true-blue dream of a sky" (e.e. cummings), forged of the purest white... where's the spattered blood of the world?


Certainly not on our hands, for we are the purest form of freedom and democracy that exists on this planet, and our actions come with oh-such-good intentions. Adolus Huxley wrote, "Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions, it is walled and roofed with them". Good intentions matter not when they lead to the murdering of tens of thousands of civilians, they matter not when they lead to the death of one innocent person. Stacking our things around us as protective individualistic walls, we are able to feel that we own our own part of the world, and our prized collection mounts with the dust of years of inaction and spiderwebs woven from a life of closed eyes. But, we have our own little lives, our own museums, monuments to our fleeting lives, and we continue to hoard and justify our miserable mizery. Thing by damned thing.


Reading these utopia-based books leaves me wondering what point we've come to in our world... I live in a small town on a mountaintop in Nicaragua where 80% of people struggle to eat every single day yet own the same amount of high-tech electronic mumble jumble as my friends back in the states- giving up their daily rice and beans for a sugary dose of daytime drama and farcical news. Chuck Palahniuk wrote, "The sound shivers though the walls, through the table, through the window frame, and into my finger. These distraction-oholics. These focus-ophobics. Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of hat. Big Brother's holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed... and this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone’s imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world". Big Brother constantly keeps the spoonful of sugar within arms reach. Just when we're ready to make a movement toward thinking in terms of freedom and breaking free of societal constraints, there he is dangling shining objects in front of our oogling eyes, enabling us to forget the pain of reality and the necessity of being awake and fully alive. We are being spoon-fed day after day in our educational systems, in our institutions, in our media... with symbols and repeated key words and new things to wish and dream about possessing. Spoonful by damned spoonful.


Did anyone else catch the ironic news of the construction company building the US/Mexican border fence being fined for hiring illegal immigrants to build the wall? What about first-hand accounts such as Michael Finkel's short story entitled Desperate Passage in which he describes an ill-fated venture with a group of Haitians crammed in the hull of a boat named Believe in God? Of the desperate measures those from the poorest country in the Western hemisphere must go to in order to have some hope of a life? What are we saying about our own standards and values if we can't understand that people from these countries, if given any chance or opportunity of having a future, would rather live in the warm circle of their own families than existing on the outskirts of our society?



One of the men in Finkel's story, a Haitian named David, speaks of his stint as a drug dealer in Naples, Florida and his fear that upon returning to the states he will return to this lifestyle in order to afford a North American lifestyle. "In America, he mentioned, there is shame in poverty -- a shame you don't feel in Haiti. 'People are always looking at the poor Haitians who just stepped off their banana boat' he said." the words "illegal immigrants" are just as emotionally and politically loaded as "terrorist" or "insurgent".


What if we were made to look into the eyes of every scared shitless "illegal immigrant" who'd left their home and family in search of the mirage of the US? For our façade of glory? Would we be able to regard them as an equal human and still justify building an eyesore of a fence between the Americas? What if we had to look into the eyes of every mother and father in Iraq, of every “insurgent” brother or sister who'd ever lost someone due to "Operation Iraqi Freedom"? Would we be able to believe in their freedom if we had to brush away their tears, if we were deeply aware of their humanity, if we inscribed every name of an Iraqi casualty on our new wall in Baghdad and traced our fingertips across the letters, the alphabet in a foreign hand yet our own hands connected on a deeper level, aware of the significance of each character, each letter, each pair of eyes?


Would we drop our gaze to the ground and pick up another stone? OR would we cast our stones aside and reach out to grasp our brothers and sisters to honor the lost and help them re-build their world rather than continuing to destroy it? In 1984, George Orwell writes, that if the average citizen "were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. It is therefore...the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs".


Bombs and walls. Fear and hatred. Self-righteousness. Possessions. Lies. We cast the stone.
We dangerously mock history.


Will we continue to allow ourselves to be fed, spoonful by damned spoonful until we become so engorged and addicted to ourselves that patriotic tears of glory arise with the news of another "insurgent' death?
Will the shining objects in our lives continue to lull us into a nightmarish dream-world in which we forget the reality of freedom and justice?


Will we avert our eyes and continue to cast stones?
Or will we fall to our knees in fumbling clarity and mourn for our war-torn world?
My question is not who will cast the first stone
For as Jesus told us we have all sinned.
My question is, who's humble and valiant enough
to put the first stone back where it belongs
in the arms of Mother Earth?


As Robert Frost wrote:
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.
This something Frost refers to, the deepest part of ourselves, the collective soul of our world, refuses to be silent.


My last question: when will we finally take a moment from our own diversions to stop, to consider, to release that something, to break walls, to break the hand of the spoon-feeding institutions, to rebuild our own world, to remind ourselves of what freedom once was, to regain the glimmer of hope in our eyes?


Put your stone down, return it to its Mother.
Embrace your own selfishness.
Embrace your neighbor.
Let love travel through these walls
and shatter them into the useless rubble .
Let them become a part of history,
a part I hope we'll never again be trained to ignore.