Published in the Brownsville Herald April, 20, 2008

March 22, 2008

Dear Editor,

Am I really awake? Are we truly planning to erect a wall along the river of our lives, the Rio Grande, the Rio Bravo? Such an eyesore stolidly intersecting our wildlife refuges, campuses and yards would be a very testament to ignorance, unthinking power and xenophobia gone unchecked. How far have we slid during this reign of fear resulting from the horrors of 911? Why are we not heeding Benjamin Franklin’s warning: “Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”?

Building a fence along a proud river hurts our very souls. Our literature, our movies, our dreams, the songs of our lives, the very metaphor “stream of consciousness,” bespeaks our love of, our need for rivers, water being the essence of life, even the major constituent of our bodies. Huck and Jim, our primordial selves, float down the river, helpless to a degree, steered by the whims of fate, as are we. We address “old man river,” who has knowledge but says nothing, who just keeps rolling along. We dream of going “up a lazy river” with our love. We go “down in the river to pray.” We dream of crossing the River Jordan towards “the peace that passes understanding.”

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down!” Robert Frost’s narrator says, musing that a wall plays homage to ancient savagery. This prospective wall along the banks of our river does homage to utter ignorance and hand-wringing, the desire to do something, anything, to demonstrate our effectiveness in keeping out people who do not have permission to be in our country.

Frozen water, sun and hunters wreak havoc on the stone wall delineating Frost’s New England property, and he dutifully patches up holes and gaps in his wall, knowing full well he is only bandaging a permanent dilemma and will soon have the same work to do over again. Well ahead of time, we know that both climbers and tunnelers will disable our wall, and we’ll employ so many border patrol agents to dissuade them that we might as well dispense with the wall altogether and hire more “boots on the ground.”

How can we insulate ourselves completely from illegal immigrants craving a better life, and in the charmingly obsolete parlance of our pundits, “those who would do us harm”? Do we fence off the Gulf of Mexico? Wall off our primarily Anglo neighbor to the North? Build a dome over our nation? We can’t do these things, nor should we. Let us not, as Joni Mitchell sings, “pave paradise” and put up a horrid wall.

The very idea of building this wall along the Rio Grande River is so achingly atrocious that I, as is natural to humans facing bewildering, untenable circumstances, am drawn to literature. Michael Chertoff, like our favorite “my way or the highway” teacher, immune to our sorrows, brings to mind the uncaring deity in Stephen Crane’s short poem: “A man said to the universe, ‘Sir, I exist.’ ‘However,’ replied the Universe, ‘the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.’” As a Valley resident, I feel like one of Dr. Seuss’s ignored, unseen Whos; however, as Horton tells us, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

We are aesthetic and spiritual beings. We crave beauty. We love rivers. We love each other. A fence is not the answer, and we must fight tooth and nail so this abhorrent monstrosity does not come to pass but fades away in memory so in later years, we nudge each other and say, “Wow, remember when the U.S. was actually planning to build a border wall along the Rio Grande River?! Ha ha ha!”

Kathy Raines