- "Without consideration, without pity, without shame
they have built great high walls around me.
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- And now I sit here and despair. I think of nothing else:
this fate gnaws at my mind;
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- for I had many things to do outside. Ah why did I not
pay attention when they were building walls.
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- But I never heard any noise or sound of builders. Imperceptibly
they shut me from the outside world." Constance Cavafy-1896
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- Oh the irony of the times. Just as we watched the send
off of the man who demanded, "Tear down that wall Mr.Gorbachev"
another wall goes up. Israel is building a wall. There's a debate of whether
it's a fence, a wall, or a separation barrier? While men in their usual
silliness argue over semantics the wall goes up. Dubbed the "Apartheid
Wall" it puts to shame the Berlin Wall. That monstrosity was 96 miles
long. Israel's Wall is expected to reach at least 403 miles in length.
The average height of the Berlin Wall was 11.8 feet compared with the current
height of Israel's Wall-25 feet. And so it will be four times as long and
twice as high.
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- The wall cuts Palestinian residents off from their argricultural
land, necessary for their survival, and prevents them from traveling even
five minutes out of the City. A single gate, open at the whim of the occupying
army, controls 100,000 residents in Qalqiliya. In addition to the concrete
wall and fencing materials used in construction of the structure, sections
include electrified fencing, two-meter deep trenches, roads for patrol
vehicles, electronic ground/fence sensors, thermal imaging and video cameras,
unmanned aerial vehicles, sniper towers and razor wire. Man in the 21st
century has most certainly improved the concentration camp enclosures of
old.
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- Why are we shocked? Iraqi's new government sits behind
massive walls and barricades. Some reports tell of whole towns fenced off
with citizens having to produce adequate ID to exit or enter. In today's
world, one would have been an astute investor, to have had the vision of
a Future World, celebrating its freedom and democracy behind walls, fences,
concrete barriers, guards, razor wire, and cameras.
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- While Israel has been about using our tax dollars (billions)
to wall themselves in and others out, we've been busy ourselves. In New
Orleans the wealthy live in gated suburban communities with names such
as; English Turn, Barkley Estates and Oakland Plantation. Not as impressive
as Israel's wall or as ugly, theirs are six foot brick walls with iron
gates encircling the luxury homes. No cracked concrete here or thundering
semis of garbage. The streets are spotless and the landscaping all professionally
done.
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- With weekly warnings of another rumored attack citizens
are walling themselves off from suspicious strangers. Ed Blakely, co-author
of Fortress America-Gated Communities in the United States says that this
walling oneself off is spreading to the middle class. About 40% of new
homes in California are behind walls. Most subdivisions, in Palm Beach
County, Fla., are gated. More than 7 million households are developments
behind walls and fences. Four million of these are in communities where
access is controlled by gates, entry codes, key cards or security guards.
These gated developments are more prevalent in Sun Belt areas such as Dallas,
Houston and Los Angeles but they're becoming more popular in places like
New Orleans, Long Island, N.Y., Chicago, Atlanta and the suburbs of Washington,
D.C.
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- People remark that they are fearful of crime and want
to feel safe. There's less traffic and everything is quiet and private.
Henry Shane who has developed 25 gated complexes says, "It limits
the amount of people who can come in." Obviously these folks will
never have to contend with anybody outside their social strata (except
the help). For property owners, it has a lot to do with protecting the
value of their homes. Blakely says, "They're trying to lock in economic
security against deterioration of property values". In Barkley Estates
in New Orleans, homes range from $300,000 to $600,000. A guard screens
visitors at the gate. Rules prohibit overnight street parking. No boats,
campers or RVs are allowed (tacky) in driveways. Houses must be painted
only certain colors.
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- The gated community is an example of a new form of social
ordering called "spatial governmentality". It focuses on concealing
or displacing offensive people or activities rather than eliminating them.
Social order is produced by creating zones where the protected group is
shielded from others' behavior. This new system of socio-spatial regulation
promotes safety for the privileged few by excluding those who are considered
'dangerous' and diminishes the scope of collective responsibility for producing
social order characteristic of the state. Cities continue to experience
high levels of residential segregation based on discriminatory real estate
and mortgage structures designed to insulate Whites from Blacks. States
have expanded their zoning laws, local police departments, ordinances about
dogs, quiet laws, etc., this provides new forms of segregation. Middle
class and upper class neighborhoods (separate sections of town) also exhibit
a pattern of class segregation by building fences, marking roads as private,
thus cutting off relationships with neighbors.
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- Also, most alarming is that traditional forms of public
spaces have almost completely disappeared from the American megalopolises.
Private police watch over these new "public private spaces" having
the possibility to filter access and reject the "undesirable person".
These are identified as NO-GO-AREAS. In Minneapolis most buildings have
been linked together by footbridges at the second floor level, forming
a continuous network giving access to shops, offices and parking. The network
is air conditioned and patrolled by private police. The street underneath,
which used to be the place of public life, is now frequented only by the
homeless. In today's society, a new social class has emerged, the "abandoned",
who is not even exploited by the upper class. The upper class does not
need them any longer. The upper classes of the world are closer to each
other (gated communities-shopping-schools-clubs-golf courses) than they
are to the "abandoned" classes. In some areas of our country
these "abandoned" people are residing in tent cities. Others
reside under bridges, or less desirable parts of town-far from sight.
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- Citizens are hardly aware of what's happening in their
own state let alone what's happening across the nation. With the building
of malls, and then giant mega stores, downtowns, once the focal point of
community, became echoing strips of dollar stores, junk stores, and bars.
No longer neighbors, strangers find themselves in an artificial environment
of controlled-windowless-guarded maze of goods and gadgetry. Dining, movies,
babysitting services, and video arcades, entice, entrap and engulf one
in shopamania. Plastic card convenience delays payment to another time.
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- Walled fortress shopping to Walled alarm protected communities.
More rural areas, absent gates, are removed by the natural environment.
Gentlemen farms, quaint villages, and leisurely country lanes, are protected
by zoning-land trusts-and various conservation easements. Absent industry,
apartments, or affordable housing, they live in a world removed from the
commerce and noise and traumas of today's world. They ship their garbage
to less desirable areas and some resort areas; see to it that their sewage
does likewise. It's Tom Sawyer-Thoreau-and Walden Pond exclusivity (with
money). One can almost imagine amidst the croaking of frogs, the fog hugging
the marshlands, and a stop at the general store, that life is pretty neigh
perfect.
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- Tented parties, bonfires in the night, steaks on the
barbeque, plenty of wine, music and like-minded-white guests, makes for
light bantering on the state of the world, environmental issues, or tales
of the latest excursion or adventure. Life is good. Slurp. The most noteworthy
crime is the town policeman picking up an errant drunk driver or running
over a disoriented frog. A crisis might have some city fool wanting to
locate senior citizen housing in the area, an addition to the town hall,
a neighbor's junkyard, or stolen sap buckets. Ah slurp!
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- Incrementally we've been walling ourselves off for years.
In a large city that I once resided in, the poor were kept in the South
Side where no respectable white person had a need to go. Government tenements,
decaying and unattended, were located beside the thruway. Again, most whites
had no idea where this was located. Walled off ( the poor) by the rush
of commuter traffic and train tracks beside an industrial park why should
they? The children played on cracked baking asphalt as drug pushers from
New York City came in to sell their stuff. Children played with empty crack
vials much as the children of old played marbles or jacks. No fear of the
police-this was an off-limits zone. Those trapped in this hell-hole were
without advocate or voice.
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- Walls of apathy, passivity, indifference, and stereotyping
were higher than Berlin or Israel could hope to build. Walls of elitism,
class and religious bias kept everyone in their assigned places. If not
they were promptly arrested. Keep Out, No Trespassing, No Loitering, signs
were posted in parks, and outside the Fortune 500 companies lining the
streets. The poor, the disenfranchised, the beggar, the wino, the elderly,
the homeless veteran, the throwaway child, the deinstitutionalized, were
not to distract from the Image of the city. Guards, cameras, and razor
wire saw to it that the less than desirable were kept out of malls, train
stations or any place of warmth. No, walls aren't new. We've merely manifested
outwardly what was already constructed block by block inwardly.
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- With over two million people now locked behind prison
walls for mostly non-violent drug offenses, walls for our private prison
industry have become a lucrative business. Besides Wal-Mart's, prisons
are our fastest growing industry. This in the land of the free. Without
a dream team, friends in high places, or political clout, "innocent
until proven guilty", is jabberwocky. Justice costs big money. Prisons
for profit need bodies and thus more and more will find themselves locked
up with draconian sentences.
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- One is reminded of the movie more each day of "Escape
>From New York." It is 1997 and a nearly destroyed New York City
has become a walled (50 ft) prison for over 3 million convicted criminals
who have lost, but survived a brutal war against the United States Police
Force. Escape is impossible-every bridge is mined and walled, the surrounding
waters are filled with deadly electricity and the Statue of Liberty has
become just another guard tower from which officers in infra-red goggles
blast, on sight, any prisoners desperate enough to try to get out. Radar
scanners revolve and helicopters circle the island of Manhattan endlessly.
Other than monthly food drops made by air into Central Park these outcasts
are left on their own to prey on each other.
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- The streets are filled with roving gangs of violent criminals
and the crazies, and the criminally insane who live in the subways and
break through the floors or pour out of manholes in hordes like sewer rats
to attack whomever they can. Once upon a time such a scenario seemed implausible.
Today with our nation's Capitol barricaded behind concrete barriers, the
White House off limits, and whole streets closed off, one has to wonder.
One has to wonder, when those who would protest today's summits and war;
are met with Walls of helmeted, club wielding Ninja mercenaries? One
has to wonder, when whole areas (Sea Island-Georgia), are inundated with
thousands of Ninja mercenaries, tanks, helicopters, and men with machine
guns, when new trade agreements take place in secret? Will the echo of
"Tear Down This Wall" be a quaint remembrance; as our walls,
interiorly and exteriorly, are ever so insidiously being built; brick by
brick, block by block and fear by fear?
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- One is left with the words of Robert Frost: "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, that wants it down." Mending Wall
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