Walls

There’s nothing inherently wrong, or right, about a wall – it just is, even though it cannot just build itself.  A wall around a prison, with barbed wire on top, should be deemed as a good thing and is a very loving thing takes the command to ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ quite seriously, especially if one of your neighbors is a young child and the person on the inside of that wall is a child molester.  The walls that fabricate your residence are a wonderful thing, keeping weather, intruders, and raccoons out and if they could talk they may have quite or sordid and vibrant story or two to tell – and if they could talk, that would also be rather creepy and you may want ask yourself which mind-altering substance you have recently imbibed if, indeed, you hear your walls talking.  If walls are the walls around the NSA complex they may have very, vey many intriguing stories to tell and they probably can and do talk.  If walls separate East and West Germany they should be pulverized, sledgehammers welcome.  If walls are meant to blockade bloodthirsty mongrels then they should be built long, but not too high, and they will help make China ‘Great’ (perhaps again). If walls form the edge of a massive natural structure like the Grand Canyon the non-conformities in their boundary layers should be noted that lend themselves to a deluge of mass proportions.  If walls form the outer perimeter of a city like Jericho, they should have a noticed placed on them that recommends the severest penalty of the law for noise violations, especially involving musical instruments first thing in the morning.  If a wall forms a geopolitical border, we should not ask who’s paying for it until we know why it’s being paid for.  There is nothing wrong with boundaries and even boundary stones are forbidden to be moved (Prov. 22:28), for without boundaries there is no such thing as national sovereignty, and without such there is no such thing as national government, and without such there is a such thing as universal anarchy or a progression towards the seabed of political totalitarianism, which is centralized universal government…welcome to a brave new world.  If you are a thug, you don’t need a bridge into a bank, you need a wall around the vault to keep you out.  If you are an honest man seeking to make a deposit, you need a bridge through the security, with proper identification.  If the bank doesn’t know which you are, they cannot be faulted for having a ‘checkpoint’ and asking to see some identification.  One cannot say they are against walls, unless they live in a cave, at which point I imagine they are quite fond of the cave walls, indeed.   If walls are protecting and defending, then they are fundamentally serving their purpose.  If these walls, however, have no doors in them, that may compel someone to bring a ladder or dig a tunnel that wishes to see the other side of the wall, at which point you may have created a bigger problem than the one you were trying to solve by building the wall in the first place.

And now, on an unrelated note about walls, I give you Chesterton:  “We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.” (‘Orthodoxy’)