"Something there is that doesn't love a wall"

In case you don’t recognize the title, it’s the first line of Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall.” In a tenth-grade English class, I was quizzed on the first and last lines of the poem. I did not remember them for the quiz, but have not forgotten since. It ends with “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Frost’s poem keeps coming back to me as I hear more and more about Donald Trump’s proposed wall. Now all along he has said two things: 1) that he would build a wall along our southern border and 2) that he would force Mexico to pay for it.

Trump has now, of course, co-opted the name “Great Wall” for it, while he’s also admitted that it may be more fence than wall, and American taxpayers will have to pay for it. To be clear, that means you and me, because Trump and his super-rich buddies barely pay taxes and he’s already planning bigger tax cuts for them, so we get to pay extra.

But lost in this was another announcement about the wall, and that was that there might be a northern wall as well, apparently to protect us from big, bad Canada. Now facts are regularly lost in this hype about a wall, including the fact that illegal immigration from Mexico is down considerably in the last eight years, and that the 9/11 terrorists entered the country legally through Canada. So it’s unclear what, exactly, this wall is supposed to do aside from adding to our national debt.

That’s where Frost’s poem comes in, because the message in the poem is actually the opposite of that last line. Good fences do not make good neighbors. Frost asks his neighbor why they worry about mending the stone wall, saying:

“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.”

The frightening truth is that Trump (and/or Putin) may be more concerned with walling us in than in walling anyone else out. Human rights scholars acknowledge that one of the first signs of trouble under totalitarian regimes is the restriction of freedom of movement. Dictatorships cannot survive if everyone is allowed to leave the country at will. That’s why the United States was so opposed to the Berlin Wall, why Ronald Reagan so famously demanded “Tear down this wall,” why freedom-lovers the world over celebrated its demise. It’s why Castro wanted to keep people from fleeing Cuba, why Jews were restricted to the Warsaw ghetto. Our own history includes restriction of freedom of movement in the form of Indian Reservations, Internment Camps, and, of course, slavery.

So all of this talk about a wall is scary. But even scarier is the current proposal in Congress to defund the United Nations. Since 1948, the United Nations has, through its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, asserted that freedom of movement, including the right to leave your own country, is a fundamental human right. And right now Donald Trump and members of Congress are threatening to withdraw financial support. To do so would cripple the United Nations, and its ability to serve as a watchdog over our rights.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall? It’s called freedom. Freedom doesn’t love a wall. And neither should we.

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