Wall of Shame

Folk-art Calavera, Tanya Photo 2008

US/Mexico's Wall of Shame

Remember John Kennedy's “Good Neighbor Policy”?

If you travel to some little villages in Colombia, for example, you will still find in the dusty town square a statue of good old John Fitzgerald.

He is still well-liked and remembered there for what was called his “Good Neighbor Policy”-- which was mainly propaganda, of course, (that's politics) but also had a germ of the profound idea that neighbors—even neighboring countries—could also be friends.

Fast forward to today:

Our own United States is presently building a wall—a very high, very big, very expensive wall-- between our neighboring country, Mexico and us.

Now as the poet said: “Good fences make good neighbors”, but he didn't say anything about walls.

Walls never work.

The Great Wall of China never kept out the enemies and neither did the Wall of Hadrian or the infamous Berlin Wall and the spite fences between neighboring churches in the little towns of old the Midwest also came a-tumblin' down.

Because the “enemies”, whoever THEY are, are ALWAYS on both sides of the wall!

I wonder if old Ronald Reagan were still alive (Remember him in Berlin: “Mr. Khrushchev, TEAR DOWN THAT WALL!”) what he would say about the crack-pot wall between “us” and “them”?

Our wall—our very own Wall of Shame—will certainly also come a-tumblin down and it will probably be sooner than later.

Tomasito, 2009

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