Walls Won't Protect Us from Bombs

“Everybody wake up
If you’re living with your eyes closed
See the man with a bomb in his hand
Everybody wake up

Oh baby it's not easy sometimes
They build these walls ever higher and hide behind them
Seems an odd way to try and make things right
Oh I feel like I go crazy sometimes

Our finest hour arrives
See the pig dressed in his finest fine
The believers stand behind him and smile
As the day lights up with fire

Everybody wake up
If you’re living with your eyes closed
See the man with a bomb in his hand
Everybody wake up

I remember the words of the misguided fool
Do unto others as you'd have them do
Not an eye for an eye is the golden rule
Just leaves a room full of blind men

And the finest hour arrives
See the pig dressed in his finest fine
Don't believe him leave and stand behind him and smile
As the day lights up with fire"
©Dave Matthews Band

Dave’s words strike a particularly strong chord within me. “We build these walls ever higher to hide behind…” and it does seem an odd way to try and make things right, does it not? Everywhere we turn these days we seem to encounter ever higher and more divisive walls that swallow people inside the shadows of their tyranical, towering, industrial, grayness.

We seem to hold the belief that somehow walls will protect us from all of the evils, darkness and ill winds that the world can blow our way. We learn that solid walls are good from our earliest fairy tales; only the piggy who builds a big brick house can defend himself and defeat the huffing and puffing big bad wolf. Build walls, stay safe.

Good will stay only on the light side and all evil will be contained within secure brick storage containers surrounded by the tallest of walls. If we can push and shove everything dark and ‘evil’ behind brick walls we then will have nothing to fear, right? So we build walls…first with our houses, surrounded by walls and fences…but wait! Two sets of walls can still be penetrated so we build walls around entire neighborhoods. Walls and fences around our schools, our cars, our communities but still we are vulnerable so we expand the walls to surround the country…

As we continue madly building and constructing walls within walls surrounded by…walls, we seem to have forgotten one very important piece of the picture; we have forgotten that every time we build up more walls, we trap people within them, outside of them – divided by them, conquered by the solitariness that comes from living in the shadows of so many damned walls!

For every four new prison walls that are constructed, thousands of lives will ultimately end up decimated and de-constructed. We have built so many walls that it is an inevitable law of gravity and nature that the walls will crumble and start to collapse around us; history bears this lesson out thousands of times over. How many millions of Americans are already being crushed by the weight of these monstrous and inhumane walls? How many more must be destroyed before we come to our senses and realize that instead of building more walls, what we need to do is to work on building bridges that span the distance and division that the walls have created?

No one could argue that some degree of separation from society does keep us safe from ‘the worst of the worst’ of our offenders. But the majority of people sitting behind towering walls in this country right now are not ‘the worst’ – in fact, they are a far cry from it. They are mothers who need drug treatment or safe shelter from an abuser; they are sisters who sold fifteen minutes and a piece of their soul in an alleyway in order to afford their next meal. They are our little brothers who found family and acceptance in neighborhood gangs since mom OD’d and dad is doing a dime for dealing pot…they are fathers, grandfathers and yes, grandmothers. What they are not is 3-headed boogeymen with fangs and claws and all of the other images the screaming, fear-mongering media heads try to portray them as.

Since we cannot see over the walls it is easy to forget that these are people who are just on the other side of them. We remove ourselves and distance ourselves from them in any and every possible way up to and including the subtle shift in lingo we use for all things prison, er, I mean ‘corrections’ affiliated. Political correctness and the softening and blurring of the edges of reality know no bounds. We have replaced a ‘prison system’ with a ‘department of corrections’. We do not put people in prison cells anymore; we now apparently house them in ‘dorms’ inside ‘correctional facilities’ or ‘institutions’. Last but not least, we are not housing prisoners or convicts but rather, inmates and offenders. As though changing the wording somehow removes them from our realm of responsibility…

People need to wake up and start seeing beyond the thinly sugar encrusted walls our politicians talk us into believing in and realize that we are all responsible for what happens to the millions of American citizens that are held prisoner behind the seemingly impenetrable walls that we feel so comforted and protected by. What is going on behind the walls, out of our view; the abuse, the neglect…the downright shameful and torturous conditions is doing anything but keep us safe.

Until there is real and genuine transparency and accountability in our prisons, we are all going to be continually exposed to “the man with the bomb in his hand” as more and more of our brothers and sisters are being driven to violent, drug induced, sensory deprived and unnecessary madness before being set free to navigate through the mad maze of walls that our society has become.

We can’t wait much longer; we’ve been living with our eyes closed for far too long now and it is high time we “see the man with the bomb in his hand” and take the practical and necessary steps to diffuse the bomb or else risk the fallout when hundreds of thousands of people pushed beyond human limitations finally explode, “the day lights up with fire” and our precious walls crash down upon us all.

Rebecca McFarland
©2010