When
In Doubt, Build A Wall
By Sally Kohn
27 April, 2007
CommonDreams.org
I wasn’t
surprised to learn about the Bush Administration’s now-uncertain
plans to build a wall between Sunnis and Shiites in Baghdad. After all,
walls seem to be one of his favorite, all-purpose solutions. From the
increased security around the presidential palace in Washington to the
anti-immigrant electrified fortress at the border with Mexico, this
president has proven himself a builder and a divider.He builds walls
around information, too. Consider the secret detention centers and extraordinary
renditions, the PATRIOT Act and secret tribunals, the stonewalling anytime
Cheney or Rove are asked to account for their actions, the attempts
to re-classify mounds of government documents and keep everything they
do secret.
When President Bush spots
a problem, he cordons it off. I imagine his task force to research what
can be done in the case of troubled individuals like Cho Sueng-Hui will
lead to much the same conclusion. Like Iraq, we couldn’t actually
have done anything to prevent the violence. We can only preempt it.
With a wall. Maybe we’ll call it an institution.
Now I could be wrong, but
I thought society was moving in the direction of tearing down walls,
not building them. Divisions between cultures. Inequalities between
races. Lines between nations. Everywhere from the internet to the European
Union to bisexuality on college campuses, it seems to me that walls
are tumbling down.
Perhaps Bush’s desperate
grabs for political bricks and mortar are signs of regressive nostalgia.
Ah, the good old days of the Berlin wall. When the enemy was clear and
the defense budget rationales were clearer. Today Bush is having trouble
getting his war supplemental through Congress. Ronnie didn’t have
these problems.
When the Great Wall of China
was finally finished in the 16th Century - the construction of which
claimed over 3,000 lives - it did little to prevent the Ming Dynasty
from keeping out the Manchus, who nonetheless overthrew the government.
Nor was the Berlin Wall particularly useful. In addition to being the
physical embodiment of Cold War anxieties and tensions, it fractured
a people who were once united, leaving such deep rifts that, in 2004,
25% of West Germans and 12% of East Germans still wished the wall existed.
Have we ever found that walling off our problems is a good solution?
What about instead …
oh, I don’t know … maybe solving our problems in the first
place. Not locking up the mentally ill but providing counseling and
community bonds. Not isolating and threatening Iran but diplomacy and
mutual aid. Not raiding and deporting immigrants but creating an economy
that works for everyone. Not creating us-versus-them hierarchies of
rights and privileges but pursuing justice and fairness for everyone
thus chipping away at the borders and walls in our hearts, our minds
and our politics.
Those who are younger than
I am and don’t remember the fall of the Berlin Wall might find
these sentiments hopelessly romantic. But the day the wall fell, the
sun started to rise on a new era of connectivity and community, upending
the dank mold of fear and resentment the wall had sheltered. Walls everywhere
that once seemed fixed became fictions. The possibility of connectivity
across divides, across the whole world, was opened up. We see that connectivity
blossoming today, watching movies from Bangladesh on YouTube and adopting
new environmental innovations from Singapore.
Good fences have never made
good policy, just as they’ve never made good neighbors. Bush’s
embrace of wall building and secrecy reminds me of totalitarian feudal
lords. But feudalism failed too, didn’t it? Now that Nouri al-Maliki
has poked a hole in Bush’s Baghdad wall plans, can we start building
some bridges instead?
Sally Kohn
is director of the New York-based
Movement Vision Project, working with grassroots organizations
across the United States to advance our shared values of family, community
and humanity. She has interviewed progressive leaders across the country
on their vision for the future.
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