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| Borrowed from Wikipedia |
Walls have been around for a long time. As architectural objects, they have a multitude of structural and cultural uses. I can claim no expert knowledge of walls, or their uses, or their endurance or deterioration over the ages, but I can gather together my sentiments towards walls and scribble them down here.
In writing a novel, THE VALLEN, featuring a wall — a border barrier, in particular, — I obviously withhold some very strong feelings towards walls, barriers, earthworks and other structures which bar or impede free movement.
Walls, as symbols in the modern era, can tend toward symbols of oppression. Whether as a levee, or river wall, in so-called levee wars, or as a border barrier or as a simple fence around an industrial area or secure facility, walls have this intimidating omnipresence about them. Promises of enduring security. Constructions that people can rally around—point at, take a picture with, touch and proclaim, like Gilgamesh, that this wall ensures a value, captures a hope, defends an ideal.
For that is what the purpose of walls primarily entails: defense. Defense against erosion, as in the Wall of Jericho. Defense against invading armies, like the Walls of Constantinople (or simply as military structures, such as forts and the Ark of Bukhara). Defense against a river or other natural force. Defense against invasive bodies, such as malware or quarantines of diseased individuals. Defense against perceived threats of all sorts — cultural, psychological, informational.
Walls have other unique properties about them. They keep in or they keep out, for instance. (They really are wondrously simple, aren't they?) Supporting walls, in civil engineering, retain a roadway from crumbling under erosive forces. The Berlin Wall, built by the Soviet Union and ruthlessly guarded, retained the people of East Berlin in East Berlin. And walls need not always be physical. In many northeast cities in the United States, walls of separation exist between neighborhoods, where, for instance, a boulevard or block or park acts as a psychological barrier between that neighborhood and this neighborhood and one sort of people from another.
So people are predisposed all over to mark out territories, proclaim this land my land, that land your land, this our property, this our way of life. Walls are thus often employed as symbols of identity; most often that group identity which feeds into each and every soul's sense of individual identity. Such that individuals will fight to defend a wall if they believe such a wall defends their sense of who they are.
Another unique property of walls is the role of the gatekeeper. Gates are an inevitability with walls. And the rules and customs of ingress and egress are as multitudinous as the varieties and sheer amount of walls as exist in the world (which, by and by, appear only to be increasing, especially along national borders). The rules which define the gate define the character of the wall.
My feelings about walls depend upon the character of the wall. For all walls have at their foundation a moral or immoral nature. And as impedance against free movement, and trade, or against the sometimes chaotic churnings of culture, walls are very much both moral and immoral at once.
Case in point, the US-Mexico border barrier may be seen as a defender of American identity by keeping Mexicans and Central Americans out (the efficacy of the barrier is often a mute point when the existence of the barrier is most employed symbolically rather than practically as a bulwark against immigrant inflows).
Is it moral or immoral to preserve cultural identity when a threat is perceived?
Don't reservations for Native Americans also serve as these sort of islands of refuge for Native American culture — where laws, and perhaps fences, wall-off the addictive, all-absorbing and obliterating tendencies of most modern-day American culture?
But perhaps this comparison is not comparing the same things. Perhaps the relationship between a majority, powerful culture against a minority, less powerful culture demand — morally — the institution of reservations to protect the minority culture. Perhaps the perceived threat of immigrants is just that: perception, when no threat actually exists. Especially if the actual identity of that powerful, majority culture is — as always, as was intended — up for grabs.
Does the US-Mexico border wall define what it means to be American? Or do gates and free passage and freedom of movement and porous borders, moreso, define what it means to be American?
Perhaps what is American? is what the all the debate over a wall is really about.