Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

It’s been a while since I revisited Robert Frost’s superlative poem, Mending Wall.

I’d read it first so many years ago that I can hardly remember myself, a teen-aged kid spending his nights poring over the pages of a compendium of poems I still possess, an anthology of the works of Modern British and American poets edited by Louis Untermeyer, himself a poet.

I was arrested by several of Frost’s poems, all deservedly famous — Fire and Ice, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, The Road Not Taken — but Mending Wall seemed a mystery. Why walls?, I think I surmised, dreaming of romance. And when I got to put my adolescent inclinations to the test I was true to form, and nothing less than telling anything and everything would do, to and fro.

Alas. Had Frost really made a dent I would have been slightly more circumspect and saved myself a bit of heartache here and there. But at the time, in the first flush of maturation, it was all or nothing at all, and the chaotic and ungraspably immense world of possibilities beckoned, a very large world indeed, broken into a fascinating puzzle of interconnecting jigsaw-like pieces on the globe I had suspended from my ceiling with fishing wire and a hook that roused my parents’ dismay, concerned as they were with order and the integrity of their home.

I often gazed at these pieces from my bed, as the hanging orb slowly spun, and wondered about the mysteries of the demarcated nations touching each other so closely, though I was drawn particularly to Italy and Greece. When my poorly-informed imagination wore itself out, I returned to the book of poems until I fell asleep, generally around 1 or 2 AM.

Borders, lines, nations, barriers, the influence of locality: surely there were reasons why languages emerged and differed, why customs left a stamp as identifiable as a fingerprint, why potentates sought to break established limits and enlarge their spheres, why certain countries beckoned to a wayfarer.

As I was getting my hair cut the other day my barber, a hefty Samoan man deft with scissors, happened to mention the Italian Olympic boxer who quit her bout after she was pummeled by an Algerian biological male fighting as a woman. I hadn’t seen the match: I’m not a fan of watching women punch each other, and I’m less a fan of unfair advantages. My barber confessed that he himself used to box, against guys his own size and weight, but that an aneurysm thwarted his career.

As I left the barbershop I thought about lines crossed and disregarded, and changing rules. I thought about the devastation of the unjust and unnecessary war on Iraq waged by my native country, and the ensuing conflicts in the Middle East, and about the huge migrations spawned as a result.

I thought about the southern border of the United States and the rumors of millions of crossings — crossings aided and encouraged by the government.

I also thought about the six months of hard, painstaking administrative effort it took for me to file my residency application papers for my emigration to New Zealand. Here in this self-styled clean, green paradise surrounded by large bodies of water, illegal immigration is virtually impossible. In fact, not long ago, I was apprised of an elderly Mexican woman who was threatened with deportation. She had worked and resided here for 25 years. She had no surviving family members in Mexico. For reasons known only to the Immigration Agency bureaucracy, she was deemed unfit for continued residence, despite the fact that her daughter had achieved citizenship.

This woman and her daughter had spent a significant amount of money on one lawyer, only to have another take up the case, much to their consternation and worry. I wrote a letter to support the woman’s residency, indicating the horrific effect her deportation would have on the mental health of the daughter. Fortunately the only just and humane decision possible was made, and she was allowed to stay.

About a decade ago I visited a man who lived near Venice, an Italian professor befriended in Philadelphia decades before. We got to talking about the ills of the world, and my friend insisted that 95 percent of them could be solved simply by manners. Courtesy, politeness, decorum and respect — they would go a very long way, so he said. We were gazing out from the belltower of the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, where we could see the Borges Labyrinth close below. Somewhere in the distance, across the Venetian mainland, lay the island of San Michele, where Ezra Pound was buried.

Pound and Frost, as poets, had their differences. One may like one or both, or some of one and some of the other and some of both. It’s a matter of taste, I suppose, and inclination, and mood, and a capacity to respect differences, regardless of taste.

The Globalistas, however, who appeal to our generous but adolescent yearnings for Oneness, seek to disestablish differences of most any kind. They’re all for open borders, which deprive independent nations of identity — unless it’s a border they arbitrarily wish to enforce, in which case they don’t care how many men or women are sacrificed.

It’s confusing, isn’t it? In the Olympic Games, ostensibly a celebration of national pride in the context of global cooperation, a man is allowed to beat mercilessly upon a woman and we’re supposed to applaud.

Confusion is a big part of their game. What’s real, what’s fantasy, what’s fact, what’s falsehood, what’s man or woman? Everything is fluid, everything in doubt, every boundary dissolved — except the Great Wall that separates Them from US, the Few from the Many, built on the stanchions of power and money.

That’s the one that needs to come a-tumbling down.

Emanuel E. Garcia, M.D.

August 2024