As a child I loved Robert Frost. I still do. As I think about immigration reform, I cannot help but think of the walls in Europe during the cold war and Robert Frost's poem Mending Wall.
I remember as a child visiting relatives in Wien (Vienna) Austria. They took me to the castles and museums. I saw the Lipizzaner horses. I played soccer and had a generally great time. There was one thing they took me to see that will remain in my memory forever, the border between Austria and Czechoslovakia.
The border consisted of two barbed wire fences separated by about a hundred yards. There were machine gun nests in towers on the Czech side of the border. I was told by my relatives that land mines were in the area between the two fences. Despite all that, people crossed. I couldn't believe the sight, yet the sight is burned into my memory.
The fences, towers and all that are gone now. I cannot help but think of Robert Frosts poem Mending Wall.
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 out-door 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."
So now I think of Mexico, the Arizona law and immigration reform. Anyone who thinks we can keep people out by building good fences is a dam fool. We are never going to build a Berlin Wall between us and Mexico. We are never going to put up razor wire fences with machine gun armed guards in towers and land mines. And if we did it sure as hell will not work. Before we send more border patrol or national guard troops to the border, we should remember Something there is that doesn't love a wall.