Thoughts on walls and bridges
He was the shining star of his family.
The statement may or may not be true, especially when it’s applied to me, but it is an example of a metaphor, the tool of writers, especially poets. A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable. When the “shining star” metaphor is applied to me, I know it’s not literally true but only wishful thinking.
Two metaphors mean a great deal when applied to how best to live, as individuals and as a society: Walls and bridges.
These metaphors arrived at my desk yesterday morning unannounced as I was reading a poem by Robert Frost and listening to a song from Simon and Garfunkel.
The famous lines from the Frost poem are these: “Good fences make good neighbors.” Seem a self-evident observation that neighbors need to keep their distance from one another, later in the same poem, Frost raises a deeper issue: “Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out.”
I’ve always thought of building a wall to keep people off my property or out of my country. But Frost raises a different perception that building a wall does more than keep people out — it also keeps them walled in. Perhaps this why he describes his neighbor building the wall this way: “He moves in darkness as it seems to me” the darkness being lack of curiosity and personal growth.
As I finished the Frost poem, the words from Simon and Garfunkel caught my attention, another metaphor for my consideration. A bridge. And the lines from their song, “Bridge Over Troubled Water” struck a different tone: “Like a bridge over troubled water I will ease your mind.”
A bridge is a connection between two points, not just over troubled water but perhaps conflicting viewpoints or even cultures or nations. In troubled water or times, perhaps the metaphor of building bridges between people is more apt to lead toward peace than walls to separate them lead to conflicts.
As I was pondering the metaphors of walls and bridges, another one crept into my consciousness from a fourth-grade class in which we were required to memorize and recite a poem. The metaphor was a road. It’s one I can recite after all these years, “The Road Not Taken.”
Most of us have come to a point in our lives when we face choices, whether it’s who to marry, which job to pursue, or these days how to survive a pandemic. Often, we don’t have the luxury of considering which road to take. So, we plunge ahead thinking we can backtrack if need be, but as Frost notes in his poem, we doubt we can go back and make a different choice.
Stretching the metaphor to see the fork in the road America is on, I imagine two possibilities.
The first is a road backward to a past age we believe is golden, but really is not — an age of relative economic security, small towns and sprawling suburbs, where the common goal is to own a home, commute to work, and where people tend to live with others who look like they do. It’s the road to the past.
The second is a road forward to a time we haven’t fully experienced yet but whose signs are in front of us now. It’s a road where cities spill over into the suburbs, people work at home, and a diverse people live together peacefully. It’s the road to the future.
Which road we take will shaped by the small and great choices we make now in our lives and the life of the nation. History is not made solely by great leaders or events, but by the countless choices individuals make each day in deciding how best to live.
I don’t know which choice you will make but I know which one I will — toward the road less traveled, a truly diverse America with roots in our democratic past and faces turned to the future which is already breaking in our midst. This road may lead to a more perfect union, one in which every person has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.