Let's Build That Wall Anyway
(With a nod of appreciation to Jonathan Swift)
Maybe Robert Frost's imaginary neighbor had it right: "Good fences make good neighbors." Yet Frost could not get out of his mind that "something there is that doesn't love a wall." He wanted to know what or whom he would be walling in or walling out.
He repeats: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down."/1 Thus did Ronald Reagan stand before the Brandenburg Gate and say to Mr. Gorbachev: "Tear down this wall."
Walls: Hadrian's Wall. Jerusalem's Western Wall. The Great Wall of China. The Walls of Jericho. The thousand and one barbed wire-topped walls behind which the guilty -- and sometimes the innocent -- are incarcerated.
As a not-so-helpful lad of 13, I was conscripted to assist my father in building a flag stone wall around our front lawn. The idea was to welcome those who would visit as it included a set of steps leading to a walkway. Nevertheless it was a wall.
The purpose of Donald Trump's envisioned wall along the nation's border with Mexico to be built by Mexicans for Mexicans and with Mexican money is, he says, to keep Mexicans walled in to their own country and out of ours.
Trump's answer to Orlando is yet another wall of sorts that would keep Muslim immigrants out and increase the number of guns in our society to protect us against those already living among us who, in his hellish imagination, would mow us down one by one.
Omar Mateen may not have been able to take 49 lives with his assault rifle if he could not have purchased one as readily as he could a loaf of bread, and if such weapons were conscientiously registered, and then only to law enforcement personnel -- if even them. But, no. That's not what the actual government of this country -- the National Rifle Association -- has decreed. More, not fewer, guns in more, not fewer, hands.
Trump, appealing to the base fears churning in the psyches of his millions of admirers, says that is precisely what he would make possible if he were President, which he may well become. Achtung.
Depending on which poll one reads, there may be more Americans who long for some measure of gun control than those who don't. In any event, plenty of Americans are depressed over the Columbine-to-Orlando continuum and dread the arc that it is tracing over the nation -- an arc that bends not to justice but to mayhem.
So here's my idea for a wall -- poet Frost's elegant objections to the contrary notwithstanding. Let there be built a wall from the Atlantic Ocean across the country to the Pacific. If you want to have guns of all sorts, make sure you are living or can move to the side of the wall on which they will be welcomed and in which they will surely be used to "decrease the surplus population," as the dyspeptic Ebenezer Scrooge was made by his creator to put it.
If, however, you understand the Second Amendment to mean that members of authorized militia should have access to firearms for the discharge of their duty to maintain the security of our free state, and, furthermore, are convinced that more guns mean more deaths than fewer, stay or move to the side where gun control will be the law, where the National Rifle Association will be told to peddle its papers on the other side.
I'm all for walling in gun lovers, allowing them the right to pack heat, open carry or whatever assuages their inner shame of phallic inferiority. "Lay on, Macduff, and damn'd be him who first cries, 'Hold, enough!' "/2
Rodney King once said: "Can we all get along? Let's try to work it out. Let's try to beat it." But there is no beating the gun culture. We've gone too far down the wrong way. There remains only separation and divorce. The Union won the War Between the States, thereby beginning a century-long process that ended indentured servitude and began to yield the legal if not the financial and social reparations due its survivors and descendants of slaves.
However, the war against the profusion of guns will not be won in the nation as it is any time soon. So it must be sundered yet again. All those in favor, say "Aye."
1/ Mending Wall. Complete Poems of Robert Frost. New York. Henry Holt and Company. p. 47
2/ Shakespeare, W. The Tragedy of Macbeth. Act V. Scene VIII. L. 33
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Copyright 2016 Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.
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Readers Write
Re special note of 6/12/16 Requiem
(Received from Laurel, Maryland; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Rochester, Michigan; Anderson, South Carolina; Hanover, New Hampshire; Spokane, Washington; Graylake, Illinois, Ontario, Canada; St. Charles, Illinois; Louisville, Kentucky; Tyler, Texas and Southfield, Michigan; New Smyrna, Florida; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Farmington Hills, Michigan)
Bobby Litwin:
Well said!
Cynthia Chase:
We can only hope that this time the American people will rise up and say no to assault rifles.
Sue Mathes:
My stomach turned to hear about the people murdered in Orlando. The NRA is directly responsible as are all their members who choose not to see what has happened in this country. Politicians that spout the NRA message should be ashamed of themselves. What else can I say?
Monica Rockwell:
Thank you for writing your piece on the latest massacre. Please consider joining Moms Demand Action (www.momsdemandaction.org) or a similar organization working for change as regards guns and keep the words coming.
Lana Boone:
With every mass shooting in this country, we hope that it will finally be the motivation to stop the NRA and their strangle hold on our government. I pray that you are right and this will finally stop the madness.
Phil and Norma Ferguson:
You couldn't be more right about that. Unfortunately we are blessed with political cowards at every level of government. Furthermore to make a big fuss about our gun culture is scary because these people are armed to the teeth and many of them are quite mentally unstable.
Paul Corscadden:
Canada already has such gun laws and our low gun-related deaths reflect this. We do not want American guns entering our country. For this reason, this is OUR fight too!
David Ewick:
Thank you for the succinct and accurate summation of our problem. I have posted my own concerns about our country's lack of gun control on my own Face Book page, only to be harangued by friends who are so afraid of the world that they must lash out at any attempts to create a sensible measure of the situation. They want to blame anything but the easy access to weapons designed only to kill other people. I do not understand the mindset. So much more could be said, and has been. I will leave it at this: Until America regains its senses and enacts legislation to reduce the access to guns, this will continue to happen.
Robert Prahl:
It takes courage, and a lot of it, to confront the self-serving NRA. There are individuals in our Congress who have that courage, but there is not enough "collective" courage to demonstrate sanity and do the right thing. The seeming hopeless incompatibility of our two political parties assures that similar catastrophes will continue unabated. It is truly a dangerous, sorry state in which we live.
Ken Johnson:
Thanks for caring enough to send a special dispatch in the aftermath of the horrors in Orlando. Your communique is about the only positive thing I can associate with this tragic day. I appreciate your finding the voice for so many of us who can't find the words, at least right now. Those of us who read your essays need no convincing that the NRA needs to be reined in. If, somehow, this tragedy leads to actual reform, at least some good will have come from this. Sadly, I am not very optimistic. Thanks for your courage.
Laura Crandall:
Thank you for your clarity, precision, and insight. Would that we didn't need it so desperately.
Charles Luevano:
If the CDC were allowed to track gun violence, the data would probably dwarf cancer as a leading cause of death in the U.S.
Janet DeMerchant:
So well said. It sickens me to hear so-called Christians spewing more hatred of Muslims due to the actions of one more disgruntled crazy who had no problem purchasing weapons.
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Re essay of 6/10/16 Would Louis Sing 'What A Wonderful World' Today?
Elizabeth Scott, Portland, Oregon:
I think too many Americans are taking this election too lightly and do not understand what is at stake. It would be unconscionable for this country to elect Donald Trump to any office, much less the presidency. Not because he's a Republican -- if he is a Republican -- but as you say he treats the truth as playable in his game. It can be whatever he needs or wants it to be. I'm not crazy about Mrs. Clinton, but I've never been in love with anyone who was President of the United States. Let's for God's sake do the right thing.
Peter Chintis, Ferndale, Michigan:
Trump is dead man talking. Now go work the phone bank and/or knock on doors.
Fr. Tom Jackson, Tyler, Texas:
After listening to Elizabeth Warren's outrageously-wonderful speech about Trump [and us?] last night...then imagining you in your car as Louis held forth with the magic words of "Wonderful World"... and now reading the perfect words from you about the world's "condition" -- well, it made this old guy react with "Yea, let's kick some butt. Let's be grateful that we can still "speak to power" and let's really celebrate that we have dear friends who march with us as you and I have marched together for 49 years. Somebody say AMEN!
Harvey H. Guthrie, Fillmore, California:
To conclude such an eloquent and right-on articulation of the terrifying state of the world with a nonsequitur "Behave yourselves and shape up or else" to Sanders and his followers is to engage in scapegoating. With the media in general it ignores the significant steps Sanders has taken this week to keep faith while the process is still underway, at the same time explicitly saying he will do all in his power to keep Trump out and get Clinton in. What Sanders has accomplished lends credibility to Louis Armstrong's vision.
David R. Cook, Onalaska, Wisconsin:
I have to say this is one of the most biting, if not bitter, contemplations on the state of things I've read lately. Your sharp, elegant prose, on this snapshot of the world and America is enough to dismay the sunniest among us. When the slow heating up of the planate thanks to human activity is added to the ongoing political mix of human beings everywhere, some to good effect, unfortunately most of it bad (especially America), it's enough to make you weep for all humanity. All in all, electing the first female candidate for President at the expense of the first idiot clown entertainer to run for President may just be the tonic to begin serious and needed change in direction for our country, if not the world. It can't get much lower than electing Trump. That, at least, is something to look forward to and celebrate. We might just be electing our first woman President at the precise time when, following the first elected black man, our nation will have more and more reason to celebrate its diversity. A truly great essay!
Amelia Ferris, Syracuse, New York:
It made me sad to read your essay, but it spoke the truth, a sad truth about the political attitudes in this country. I read an article in the New York Times this morning about Senator Elizabeth Warren. Now there's a politician who speaks the truth, and it is like a knife blade. I keep wondering why she isn't the Democratic candidate for president. But, you're right. We now have no choice but to vote for Hillary Clinton, who, as President Obama says, is probably the best-prepared person ever to run for the office.
Blayney Colmore, Jacksonville, Vermont:
I hear an echo of my parents and grandparents saying, "I'm glad I won't be around to have to clean up this mess." There are countless ways our species could end the experiment we surely are, and one day, whether by our own hubris, or the inevitability of the winding down that every thing does, our kind, and even this planet, will meet her end. In the meantime (and it does feel like a particularly mean time, I grant you), our best bet is to double down on whatever small thing we might do to add to the luster of a life we neither earned nor could have imagined. Lending to the election of Hillary Clinton might be a starting point this morning.
Nicholas Molinari, Brick, New Jersey:
Thank you for another superb essay. "Oh, it'll never happen here!" Yeah, sure, never! Just like rational Germans and Italians thought in the 1930s. Even the Jews who lived in that infamous era were certain. Living in both fear and denial. "We're being marked and ostracized; deprived of our jobs; forbidden to practice our professions; stripped of our rights to vote and participate in the body politic; taxed, fined and driven into financial ruin and poverty by government confiscations; segregated into tight ghettoes where we'd be easily controlled and monitored; relocated to "better" quarters in the country-sides, etc, etc. Yes, the road to extermination was well planned and executed by sadistic geniuses, up to and unto the Final Solution. Along the way, Jewish citizens, because of a misguided belief in Yahweh's providence and protection, decided that each step -- each disparagement -- each loss of rights, property and citizenship -- would be the last deprivation they'd have to endure under the Fuhrer. The actual "last" step was a shower in the gas chamber!" All the elements are in place here. A populist egomaniac. The appropriate scapegoats. The macho venom vociferously spewed forth by illegitimate another would-be "Savior." The enthusiastic expropriation of the personal rights of the scapegoats, followed naturally by rights-taken even from the demagogue's aficionados. "Hey that's not supposed to happen!" What created Trump was a toxic mix of racism, political malevolence, perpetual lies and doubletalk; science-denial, anti-intellectualism, material satiation, worship of weaponry, commitment to ignorance, mental devolution -- and silence from the reasonable citizens amongst us! Oh yes, indeed it will happen again! Will it be here?
Bertram Goens, Ocala, Florida:
I'm new down here, but I can tell you that there are a lot of people here who think Donald Trump is just what this country needs: a no-holds-barred clean up of government and nation. I have never voted Republican, but I can see myself doing it this year. Trump is right about political correctness and the elite of both parties running things as they please. Sanders is right about the rotten process of super delegates running the nomination. Hillary Clinton will get her comeuppance just as she did in 2008. We need a radical change.
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