Breaching the wall
By Al Vester
Take down this wall
Was a president’s call
To heal a divided nation
The statesmen have all died
Their office filled with men of pride
Who view integrity a form of dissension
Where now is the call
By either great or small
To heal hate and contention.
We line up on opposing sides
While the truth tries to hide
That we’ve lost our compassion.
What are walls?
Walls are separators. Most physical walls in our current society are built to provide security, to reduce the risk of someone breaking into our home or business. But the process of shutting out bad guys also includes shutting our self into a more limited space. Many neighbors used to chat over a backyard fence, but security walls preclude such chats by their height and lack of openings. For many people, the over-the-fence chat is a thing of the past.
Social walls
The most damaging kind of walls are the social and cultural walls that separate people by who they are or where they come from. This kind of wall creates an “us versus them” mentality. The lists of “us versus them” kind of walls are multitude. They may be relatively harmless such as school rivalries, or as destructive as international wars.
Immigrations walls
Some would build walls to stop illegal immigration, but a cheaper and more effective method than a wall would be to make legal immigration easier and more efficient. If immigrating legally was relatively cheap and easy, no one would pay a smuggler thousands of dollars to help them enter the country illegally.
Tariff walls
When companies compete in business in the same country, the most efficient company will usually be to most successful. But, when tariffs on imported goods are involved, a less efficient but politically connected company may be able to money without improving their products or their processes. Without real competition, companies can lose incentive to progress resulting in their products soon becoming second rate. Eventually, the average citizen suffers by having to choose between cheaper but inferior local products or better but more expensive foreign products.
Political walls
The saddest commentary about our current society is the way that political parties are spending vast efforts and resources searching for and pointing out each other’s faults and failings. If only a tenth of such efforts were devoted to solving current domestic problems, most would have been solved or a compromise solution found. Instead the news is filled with reports of misspelled words or stray comments called into question, while the needs of the country are lost in the shuffle.
