The world seems bent on building walls, an old solution for new problems: Russia and China trying to keep the North Koreans in North Korea, the US working hard at preventing Mexicans from coming into the US. Israel tried walling itself off from Palestine, but it only made things worse.
Perhaps the efforts make us feel we are doing something to solve what has always been unsolvable. Walls may slow them down, but people seem to flow to where they want to be sooner or later, whatever the barriers, so, at best, it is a costly stopgap. And it has unintended consequences. When I paid my first property tax bill and learned about prop 13 and the tax ramifications, I thought it was a incongruous system. I suggested that we tax land at all the same rate. So taller buildings would be less expensive and holding a great swath of land would cost appropriately. I still hear the giggles.
I grew up in New York City and frankly never noticed walls besides those that held up buildings; ones without windows or doors were prized as handball backboards. There were fences here and there around flowerbeds or playgrounds and, when I visited friends upstate in more rural areas, fences there were just high enough to keep the kids out of the creek or the dog from the tomatoes.
As suburbs sprouted closer to the city with smaller and smaller lots, backyards were typically surrounded by wood fences, some of the boards more widely spaced for visibility than others. Having less distance between you and your neighbors apparently made privacy more prized. A friend of mine did some research on how our landscaping evolved and apparently we were trying to imitate the British landed gentry, with their great lawns and properties, and their sense of being separate and protected from trespass by those peasants. The commons were gradually enclosed and now belong to a relatively small group of landowners. Rich ones. Land has always been a measure of wealth.
When I moved to Southern California in 1959 I found not just ordinary fences but imposing block walls, of the kind I imagine we are building along the Mexican border. Made of large gray or tan cement bricks and typically stacked at least six feet high, the walls enclosed all sides of the residential rear yard except where the gate opened from the front. I could never figure why they were so popular. Maybe cement was cheaper than wood in our dry desert, or we were all terrified of our neighbors, but they were penitentiary ugly, even when masked by vines or bushes and prone to crumbling in earthquakes.
Block walls around backyards eventually grew to block walls around whole communities, euphemistically called “gated” with guards or key cards at the few entrances, a model that was rapidly replicated throughout the Southwest. Many were designed exclusively for retirees and some encompassed golf courses within their boundaries. Having once had a rib cracked with a wildly hit golf ball, this seems a danger of a different sort.
There are behavioral consequences that come with walls. Sometime in the early 1970’s, Southern California had a terrible series of storms and flooding. At the time I was living at the end of a street next to a dry creek bed, so dry that a section down stream was part of a golf course. When the police came to ask us to evacuate, that dry creek bed had become a raging river, carrying debris from the houses along its bank that it had already swept away. We gathered in the street, the neighbors across the road and on either side; the men deciding how they would protect their properties, the women making sure everyone had a place to go.
When the crisis passed and we were all happily home again, I realized that I had no idea of how the neighbors over my back fence had fared; they also bordered the creek bed. All I knew was that they were a large family who sometimes kept chickens and ducks. The ducks had flown into my yard on one occasion --- ducks don’t find walls a problem --- and children of all ages appeared at my door to reclaim them. I finally walked around the block and knocked on their door. By the time I explained my concerns, I felt embarrassed and they were looking at me with suspicion.
Since moving to Northern California, I’ve done some volunteer mediation and many of the neighbor vs. neighbor cases that I’ve mediated start with walls or fences and often end when people finally see and hear the people on the other side. The elderly couple complained about the two barking dogs on the other side of their back fence until they heard that the second dog belonged to the young wife’s mother dying of cancer. They wound up planning a barbecue so the dogs would get to know them. The old lady who repeatedly had her sons take down the fence between her house and the one down the hill because it blocked the view of the bay she’d enjoyed for decades. They all agreed to replace the fence but made it shorter to meet her needs. I learned that people pretty much ignored legal solutions in favor of what was practical.
These are little stories of walls and fences, but they play out the same for walls that nations build, dividing families, tribes, workers and jobs, but mostly keeping one set of people from knowing and appreciating and supporting another set. It is too bad they can’t see and hear each other and maybe plan a barbecue. As Robert Frost observes we continue to abide by the old rules insisting good fences make good neighbors when all the evidence is to the contrary.
Excellent
Well said