I Hate Walls.

I’m not talking about those walls in the bathroom that give you privacy from peeking eyes or walls that keep your cows from wandering away but those walls people create to define what is theirs. Call me socialist but walls serve to separate people where meaningful connections could otherwise exist. I think they’re a paranoid device man has created to frantically retain control over something that they can’t prove belongs to them without creating some complex legal system that protects their interests.

Think back historically, how many walls have been created since pre-biblical times in China to Berlin. The Berlin Wall separated loved ones, friends and neighbors who lived side-by-side for decades. What good would Donald Trump wall to keep Mexicans out of the US accomplish? War & livestock aside, when has a wall served the greater good?

We put up walls when we are defensive and paranoid. When we are defensive and paranoid we look at other people as aliens with an agenda. When we do that, we set aside our similarities and compare our differences and inflate them until it becomes the enemy.

Why are there borders between countries. Many reasons that make sense from a position of power, but not in bringing people together. Similar to a wall fanatics of one soccer team will erect to distance themselves from other teams, like this Serbian/Albanian match. Walls may result in a sense of Nationalism, but that too is a slippery slope. People all the time, even me sometimes, confuse commemorating family and traditions with blind pride for something that we were merely born into, not by choice.

People still to this day kill for patches of land an arms length long because in some distant past it had belonged to a relative. You might be thinking, it’s because these people don’t have clearly defined walls. Maybe so, but even when there are clearly defined borders, it doesn’t stop one power hungry individual from taking this unpossessable thing called land from someone else.

A wall can keep things in but it won’t let anything in our out. Consider the Soviet USSR. One of the most complex examples of walls inside of walls. If you lived in any of the Baltic countries during that period, you were essentially locked inside a jail cell inside a prison by people whose original and tainted ideal was to allow everyone to live under one equal class. Instead you had a society that stagnated and lived in constant fear. It became worse than a society that restricted the in and outflow of ideas because instead of an idea hitting a wall and dissolving, the idea actually put you in danger of being arrested, deported or executed.

Ideas can be dangerous. Suppressing of ideas is usually more dangerous. Ideas are like carbonation in a soda bottle. It doesn’t matter the shape of the bottle or how you try to change the path the bubbles go, they’ll always float up, whether you want them to or not. If you shake it, it will build up pressure, the heat will further expand the molecules until finally it bursts. and you’re left with a mess that’s 10x more effort to clean up then had you unscrewed the top. It’s a metaphor that’s played itself out in history time and time again.

I’m not saying you should drink your soda off the floor but to think before you put that fence up. It’s a sad truth that in some countries like here in Colombia fences are such a necessity to keep your house from getting robbed. I don’t yet have a solution for this but walking through these neighborhoods feels more like patrolling a houses contained in their own jail cell then strolling through a community. I hate walls…