Another brick in the wall

There's that line from "A Few Good Men" that Jack Nicholson's Col. Jessup pipes out, "Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns."

But how come every nation that's ever tried to achieve security through the construction of walls has failed? I don't know...for some reason, Huey Newton's quote about walls seems to ring more true, even though some of Newton's tactics for social change are extremely questionable. Newton said: "The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people."

Yet walls are still at the forefront of national security. Israel has built a wall to separate its West Bank border from Palestine. In December, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to construct a wall between the U.S. and Mexico - the 260-159 voice vote on an amendment to a bill on illegal immigration "mandates the construction of specific security fencing, including lights and cameras, along the Southwest border for the purposes of gaining operational control of the border."

Lest we forget that we're also less than two decades removed from the Berlin Wall, which divided pro-democracy West Berlin and pro-Communist East Berlin. Not to mention only a few decades removed from the invisible walls of Apartheid and segregation - which many might argue still exist today in various places.

All this discussion on walls stems from a quote I read this weekend by Indian guru and yogi Paramanhansa Yogananda, who said, "Kindness is the light that dissolves all walls between souls, families and nations."

Of course, I don't see an Indian guru and yogi having much influence in the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, or in the Israeli parliament.

So maybe the words of the Dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs, Edwin Dorn, might ring louder. In his commencement speech from a few years ago, Dorn said, "Closed societies do not thrive. Countries that seal their borders do not thrive. Universities that lock their laboratories to new research find themselves relegated to intellectual backwaters. Societies that build walls to protect themselves, eventually wind up being crushed beneath them."

Walls aren't invincible. Look at Berlin. Look at the Great Wall of China. Look at apartheid in South Africa. They've all been dismantled (or, in the Great Wall's case, its purpose has been dismantled, even though it physically still exists).

History is repeating itself in Israel, and will likely repeat itself at some point along the U.S.-Mexico border. But the tallest walls will only last so long.

Or, as Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, "Only your compassion and your loving kindness are invincible, and without limit."