Walls

This one is a brief diversion, something I didn’t really plan, want or intend to do here and I am working on a two or three part piece about a current event, one that will be current on Monday, March 20. But tonight, this brief note about walls.

Watching some of “Full Metal Jacket” tonight got me thinking about walls, got me to thinking about a wall I am absolutely certain our wall-obsessed president has never seen, never been to — the Vietnam War Memorial

It’s a wall with 58,307 names on it.

Every president should visit it the first week in office so he (and someday she) understands what it means to be “commander in chief”.

If one had not dodged the draft because of “bone spurs” one’s name might have been on it.

Mine might have been but I got lucky and they sent me to Panama just when they were sending 9 out of 10 over there to that other place where, figuratively, they were building that wall that now stands in memorial to them.

I am certain that I must have known some of the 58,307 people whose names are on that wall. You could not have done basic and advanced infantry training between Sept. ’65 and Feb. ’66 and not have known someone whose name is on THAT WALL.

Walls, you know, are meant to keep people in as well as keep them out.

The Great Wall of China was defensive but in the end it did not stop the Qing or Manchu dynasty — that came from outside the wall — from becoming the last to rule China before revolution by the Kuomintang and then subsequent revolution by those who trekked the Long March and survived to install communism in China. You can see the wall today if you visit China. You can also see and read history, which says it failed. All walls do except those in memorial because they speak to us forever.

Hadrian’s Wall, built on order of  Emperor Hadrian and designed to keep barbarians like the Picts from crossing into Roman Britannia, ultimately was abandoned by the Romans to build another wall ever farther north on the main British island. It failed.

The “barbarians” won in the end (they always do). They moved over it, crossed it and  and in turn were conquered and their conquerors conquered. Today they, the Picts, and the Romans, and the Celts, and the Angles and the Saxons, and  and the Normans and the Norsemen  are all mixed together in England, which is only part of the main British island, in Englishmen and Englishwomen. But mind you, they were and are not Scots or Welsh or Irish, because those are other separate stories with and without walls except perhaps castle walls.

The Warsaw Ghetto Wall kept people in, 450,000 at first. I believe fewer than 200 of all those are know to have survived.

The Berlin Wall kept people in but, like all walls, people breached it again and again and again until finally it was torn, down, at first by bare hands.

Is there a lesson in all that and much more that can be written about walls? Oh yes. It’s this. Let’s not build anymore walls anywhere for any reason.

That one in Washington, the with 58,307 names on it, is more than enough and should be the last one we ever build.