Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?

I wonder if gated communities around America contain any liberals. The way liberals have been attacked for the past four decades you would think they would be busy building gated communities and even moats to keep the conservatives from spinning their fixed-axle tired beliefs across liberal lawns. But few liberals actually live in suburban gated communities and they generally do not spend their weekends mowing acres of grass as conservatives do in ritualistic homage to their real or imagined ancestors who once mowed fields of hay. Of course I am fantasizing. Most of them hire illegal immigrants to mow their fields of dreams.
Right now the Republican presidential candidates are debating about, among other efforts to fortify or dismantle, who can build the toughest, most impenetrable defense against unwelcome border crossings from Mexico. If conservatives can build a wall to keep law and order, they will. That you can count on. It is one of the ways orthodoxy maintains its purity.
Robert Frost has the narrator of his poem “Mending Wall” raise the question about walls that inevitably must be asked: “Why do they make good neighbors?” The narrator was responding to his neighbor’s saying: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The neighbor could not explain how the wall made good neighbors; he simply repeated the statement, as if it were self-evident.
Conservatives like what they perceive to be self-evident truths such as “life is not fair” and "that government is best which governs least."* They take the notion of self-evident truth from the preamble to the Declaration of Independence where self-evident truths are proclaimed in America’s famous formal declaration. There, Thomas Jefferson declares that “all men are created equal” except, of course, for those who are not considered in the count such as African-Americans and non-property holders at the time of the Preamble’s writing.
America has always had rebellious sorts represented in its literature. Huck Finn, for instance, when confronted with what are for him the orthodox strictures of the widow Douglas and Miss Watson, complains very early in the novel that all the food provided to him by the pair “was cooked by itself.” Then Huck delivers a cosmic statement that applies to much more than the separation of foods: “In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and things go better.” In that single statement author Mark Twain is suggesting that separation is not the solution. America is, in effect, a barrel of odds and ends and needs to let the natural evolution of things take its course. Separation is artificial, unnatural, and unsavory. Twain is preparing the 19th Century reader for the relationship Huck soon after develops with runaway slave Jim.
21st Century America is gradually “browning” and not because of global warming. Demographers project that by 2042 the majority of the U.S. population will be non-white.** We will be more of a blend of non-white minorities than a majority of whites. Huck would happily adapt to such an America.
Walls, like principles, can provide security. They can keep us anchored to a place in space, time, and thought. They can also bind us or confine us. We can become prisoners of our own creation. We can wall ourselves in as we wall something else out. There is always a loss for every imagined gain.
In fact, the wall along the Mexican border may end up protecting Mexico more than the United States. Mexico’s economy is on the rise; its birthrate is dropping; and there is less need for Mexicans to come to America where jobs are hard to find. By the time we build a sturdier wall along the border, we may no longer need one, but Mexico may.
Some of the most famous walls in history are monuments to ancient times reminding all who encounter them that they, too, are of questionable practical value beyond serving as tourist attractions. The Berlin Wall (what’s left of it), the Great Wall of China, and the many walls left by the Roman Empire scattered across Europe are reminders of how temporal the intentions of man are and how vestigial are his monumental works of stone.
Today the wall that keeps the Palestinians away from the continual expansion of Israeli settlements into their former land serves a short-term solution for Israeli immigrants and exacerbates a long range problem for the region. The Mexico-U.S wall may do the same. We, too, are walling out because we say we want law and order so long as it benefits those who hold power in the United States. At the same time we want freedom from law and order in order to exploit the weak by paying them a wage that brings a lower standard of living. Barriers to keep immigrants out of the country are good; barriers such as unions which protect workers from having to accept a lower standard of living are bad. What is your wall of protection is someone else’s barrier. No wall is neutral.
Frost ends his poem “Mending Wall” resigned to the fact that his neighbor will not question the principle handed down to him by his father even when the fence no longer serves any practical purpose:
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 as well/He says again, “ good fences make good neighbors.”
* The latter quotation was first made popular by that counter-culture icon Henry David Thoreau who used it in the opening sentence of his essay “Civil Disobedience.”
**(http://articles.cnn.com/2008-08-13/us/census.minorities_1_hispanic-population-census-bureau-white-population?_s=PM:US).