tfdl

A recent piece in The Washington Post epitomizes much of what is glaringly wrongheaded about our "homeland security". The story highlights the plight of some folks in the border town of Derby Line, Vermont - a town that culturally and in all sorts of everyday ways straddles the border between the US and Canada. The "line" separating the US and Canada bisects neighborhoods, and in a few cases even houses.

According to Post's writer, Keith Richburg:

First was the white, painted lettering on the pavement on three little side streets -- "Canada" on one side, "U.S.A." on the other. Then came the white pylons denoting which side of the border was which. After that, signboards were erected on some streets, ordering drivers to turn back and use an officially designated entry point.

And with these unwelcomed changes of course came an influx of American Border Patrol personnel.

These residents are "good Americans" living in a "post 9-11 world". Yet they live in a state whose motto is "Freedom and Unity". They now live in a nation that seems to demand they give up their freedom and unity in order to guarantee our security. These Americans were willing to make those compromises, if it would make the Republic safer. Eventually, they have came to see the one inevitability that occurs when the national conversation shifts from the complex interplay between security and liberty to the more simplistic one between security and more security. That inevitability is... fences.

For longtime residents accustomed to a simpler life that flowed freely across a largely invisible border, the final shock -- and what made most people really take notice -- was a proposal by the border agents last year to erect fences on the small streets to officially barricade the United States from Canada, and neighbor from neighbor. "They're stirring up a little hate and discontent with that deal," said Claire Currier, who grew up in this border area and works at Brown's Drug Store, which has operated on the same spot since 1884. "It's like putting up a barrier. We've all intermingled for years."

Instead of focusing on real suspects determined to do harm, border agents seem more concerned with their response to an errant Frisbee tossed across the line through a neighborhood.

[The border patrol agent in charge] Beltran said he instructs his agents to use discretion and "common sense." It goes like this: "If a kid [on the Canada side] throws a Frisbee over here, he can come and get it. But if he got the Frisbee and kept walking down to the Arby's to get a soda, we're going to stop you."

"We can't be wrong once," Beltran added. "If we're wrong once, that could be devastating to the whole country."

Actually, they can be wrong once - or more than once in this case. The alterative is to get to know that kid, buy him a soda at the Arby's and ask him to let you know if he sees anything suspicious happening in his neighborhood. That would be "common" sense.

Real security in places like Derby Line, Vermont lies in the fact that they know their Canadian neighbors so well. They are the ones who can be most vigilant, and would know if interlopers were to try to come across their border through their neighborhoods and past their general store. It is the fact that they have developed such strong bonds of friendship and familial ties that this part of the border is probably more secure than most. And these bonds are the very ones that our overzealous government is hell-bent on severing.

Instead of encouraging citizens on both sides of that imaginary line to stay connected with each other, to continue to worship together, and socialize, and work with each other to sustain their way of life that has held fast for generations, we are making those connections difficult to sustain and making our republic just that much more vulnerable.

And it is precisely in towns like Derby Line, Vermont where the shortsightedness of the Department of Homeland Security comes into highest relief. Because these government officials see "the border" as a static object set in stone, then they are hard pressed to see any other way to increase their security than with more stones, more brick and mortar, and perhaps one day with razor wire. It is as if leaders in our government have spent the past seven years in a paranoid haze, and the last two weeks seeing pictures on television during the Olympics of the Great Wall in China without noticing that in the end it failed both to keep to barbarians out and native Chinese in.

Maybe our fellow citizens who are so eager to "secure the homeland" by building fences might want to revisit something that the poet, Robert Frost, who lived in Ripton, Vermont - about a hundred miles south of that border - once wrote in his poem, Mending Wall:

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast...

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall...