Something there is that doesn’t love a wall

tRump and his toadies are obsessed with the wall.  That is not news to you or me.  What surprised me was the intensity with with some of his toadies in my neighborhood brought that "wall" to the very fences that mark our community.

Wrote one in an email to the 'hood:

"Have you looked at some of the fences ... lately? What is the point ... when ANYONE ... can WALK into a backyard area, through a broken fence. It’s embarrassing; it’s ugly; and it does not show respect for the other neighbors living here."

A wall or a fence is a statement about ourselves as much as it is about the others.  This is what Robert Frost wanted us to think about in the layers of human complexity that he presents in Mending Wall.  He writes there:

Before I build a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offense.

Neither tRump nor his toadies care to think about "what I was walling in or walling out / and to whom I was like to give offense."

I would like to email Frost's poem to my neighbors.  And for all of us to bring to a neighborhood meeting our understanding of the lessons that we learnt from the poem.

But then I need to remind myself that I am a brown-skinned immigrant with a funny accent, and who looks like an Arab.  For all I know, the toadies might rally outside my home and chant "send him back!"

So, instead, I will end this post with Robert Frost's Mending Wall.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down. 'I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. 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 so well
He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'