I was really moved watching the CBC documentary Up Against the Wall last night. Film-maker Eileen Thalenberg considers the dozen walls which have been erected since the Berlin Wall came down twenty years ago. She focuses on the three walls put up by democracies to keep people out, including the "Tortilla Wall" seven hundred miles long keeping illegal Mexican immigrants out of the United States. At four million dollars a mile, my math figures that this will cost upwards of three billion dollars. While it looks imposing it isn't make a dent in the flow of drugs and weapons between the two countries.
We watch a Methodist minister who goes regularly to an imposing set of bars along the border in what is called Friendship Park. He serves communion to families and friends who gather on either side of the bars to talk. The security wall will soon make even this communication impossible and the pastor is arrested during the protest. Other volunteers walk sections of the wall in desert areas leaving food and water for those who may be in distress.
Without being heavy-handed the documentary invites us to ask what divides us and whether security can be established by barriers.
Did anyone else see this?
I didn't see the documentary but this reminded me of the book "Blind". [also a fairly recent movie]. It seems to be an eerily similar process that begins with an inkling that there is something to be feared. It isn't that the thing to be feared isn't real but that our repsonse is pathological, similar to what happens during an anxiety attack only it's on a bigger scale and communual.
ReplyDelete'In a perfect world" it would seem that physical barriers aren't a true solution to keep people from doing bad, or on the other hand to keep them doing good either...it doesn't change the motivation or behaviour, just the access to it.
ReplyDeleteHumankind does seem to spend alot of time (and other resources) building barriers (both physically and metaphorically) rather than bridges. As Pupil said, fear likely is the driving force.
Yes I think fear is at the heart of all this and we assume that building the walls to either keep people in or shut them out will be the answer.
ReplyDeleteAnd you're right that the walls don't have to debate the motivation for wanting to breach them.
One observer in Israel noted that walls give a sense of security to begin with, then heighten the anxiety about those we can't see.
Thanks.