opposing sides © Sheila Dee

I always thought Robert Frost was right to ask so plainly in a poem we had to memorize for school, why it was that good fences make good neighbors:

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 offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.

And, if a wall could talk, what stories would it tell? I suppose the first time I pondered this question was when I traveled with the North East Ulster Schools Symphony Orchestra to Germany for our annual summer trip. Ordinarily, it was two weeks in Ballycastle with a concert for our parents on the final night, but this summer would be my first away from Northern Ireland, from one bitterly divided place to yet another, the latter split in two by the Berlin Wall. It was 1978. I was only fifteen years old and knew only a little about the wall that had been erected under the direction of Nikita Khruschev two years before I was born. By the time I was old enough to understand it, the wall had become the definitive symbol of the “Iron Curtain” that had divided Eastern and Western Europe since 1945.

I remember the teenage bassoon player who urinated on the Berlin wall, offending, as he did, some passersby who didn’t understand that the wall was infinitely more offensive with its barbed wire and watchtowers and armed guards with shoot-to-kill orders. In retrospect, I wish more of us had been like him, outraged and outspoken, but we were curious and circumspect. We were a little afraid, when we took a trip beyond the curtain and into East Berlin, where the young tour-guide assigned to us instructed us not to photograph bridges or buildings.

Although we were all from Northern Ireland – except the orchestra conductor, who was English – most of the Catholic kids among us had Irish passports whereas the Protestants carried British papers. This caused some delay and confusion at the border where I was delighted to acquire the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) stamp, the first in my first passport marking forever the borders that bear down on us, closing in on us, constricting rather than expanding our vision of what our world could be like . . .

Once on the other side, my face pressed against the window of an old bus, I was sad. The sad grayness of the austere city on the other side of the glass, a stark contrast to the bright and bustling Kurfürstendamm Avenue on the West Side – Ku’damm  – where fancy restaurants, bijou boutiques, and world-class museums made it too easy to be oblivious to the wanting on the other side of that wall. Although we knew her for only the shortest time, I remember feeling sad for the young woman who had served as our tour guide. She would not – could not – join us in West Berlin to hear us perform Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor for a radio program.

A group of youngsters from Northern Ireland schools made little impact in 1978, but it was different for the man who would visit East Berlin a decade later – Bruce Springsteen. He told the crowd that had never experienced anything quite like him – a wrecking ball even then, that he was there and on their side, raging against the injustices built up in that wall:

I’m not here for or against any government. I’ve come to play rock ’n’ roll for you in the hope that one day all the barriers will be torn down.

A fan of The Boss, I like to think it was he rather than Ronald Reagan who urged Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down that wall and that somewhere in that swelling crowd, was the teenage bassoonist who had relieved himself against the Berlin Wall a decade before.

Watching on television when the wall came down was a seminal moment in my personal history. I recall wondering about our young tour-guide and if she had been reunited with family and friends in the West.

Photographer, Kai Wiedenhöfer, documented the occasion, believing that the fall of the Berlin Wall would end forever the notion that a wall is the answer to some of the most complex issues of our time. But his subsequent work reflects a “renaissance of walls,” that includes the Peace Lines in my beloved Belfast, Northern Ireland, the West Bank fence that separates Israel and Palestine, the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea, and the border between Mexico and the United States.

Since the Berlin Wall came down, 28 new border walls have gone up all around the world.  Ironically, these walls that are going up at such an alarming rate reflect not totalitarian regimes intent on keeping their people form seeking freedom and opportunities beyond their borders; rather, democracies such as these very United States, intent on keeping such people out. Wiedenhöfer’s Wall on Wall exhibition  features 36 giant panoramas of modern man-made barriers glued on the longest remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall. He hopes the installation will spark a conversation about why the walls between us today are taller, longer, and stronger than any we could have imagined on that jubilant November day in 1989 when echoes of Kennedy’s visit to Berlin in 1963 rang in our ears:  “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

Harrowing then to consider the Corker-Hoeven provision in the United States Senate Immigration Bill which provides the following measures, to the tune of $46 billion over the next decade, to bolster border enforcement:

• doubling the number of Border Patrol agents stationed along the U.S.-Mexico border, to at least 38,405
• erecting 700 miles of steel fence along the border
• putting in place military grade surveillance equipment – the kind of thing already tested in Iraq and Afghanistan: surveillance towers, camera systems, ground sensors, radiation detectors, mobile surveillance systems, drones, helicopters, airborne radar systems, planes and ships.

Why? Why? “To achieve 100 percent surveillance of the border with Mexico and ensure that 90 percent of would-be crossers are caught or turned back.” What are the consequences? Since 1994, when the United States began beefing up border-enforcement, the Arizona Recovered Human Remains Project reports that the remains of more than 6,000 people have been recovered on the United States-Mexico border. The Senate Bill’s “border surge” guarantees the loss of life to continue. Think about those deported individuals who have lives here in America; wouldn’t they risk everything to return to their families? Wouldn’t you? Often, they must choose treacherous crossing routes to elude border patrol agents and hike high in the mountains or deep into desolate desert scrub where the temperatures soar above 120 degrees. Combined with lethal heat, the uncompromising desert terrain causes the most common form of death – dehydration. No More Deaths – No Más Muertes works tirelessly to bring an end to this humanitarian crisis, providing assistance to migrants, faithfully leaving water and food in remote and deadly parts of the Sonoran desert. The mission of the organization is noble and humane, reminding me again that the very best of humanity coexists with the very worst.

“ No Más Muertes aims to end death and suffering on the U.S./Mexico border through civil initiative: the conviction that people of conscience must work openly and in community to uphold fundamental human rights. Our work embraces the Faith-Based Principles for Immigration Reform and focuses on the following themes:

• Direct aid that extends the right to provide humanitarian assistance

• Witnessing and responding

• Consciousness raising

• Global movement building

• Encouraging humane immigration policy.”

But we are so very far away from humane immigration policy aren’t we? When there are those who are so enraged by the kindness in leaving water jugs for desperate, parched travelers, that they take it upon themselves to slash open those water containers and allow the water to pour out on the parched desert. It takes my breath away to consider the extent of the inhumanity. Yet, we continue to invest in more walls, to barricade ourselves in and others out.

I will never understand.

Immigration policy should be generous; it should be fair; it should be flexible. With such a policy we can turn to the world, and to our own past, with clean hands and a clear conscience.

~John F. Kennedy 1958