He is all pine and I am apple orchard. 
My apple trees will never get across 
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. 
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Robert Frost, "Mending Wall"

Something in us wants to keep us apart from one another. Over the centuries, we have built walls to keep "us" inside and "them" outside. None of the walls worked. Something else in us apparently wants to bring us together.

History's most famous walls are a testimony to this see-saw dialogue in the human heart. The Great Wall of China, the largest and longest manmade structure, was built and restored over a 2,000-year period by several dynasties to protect the Chinese interior from "barbarians." For many centuries, it did exactly that, but then the Mongols scaled the weakest points and conquered the Chinese empire.

The walls of Troy stood for hundreds of years, keeping in a highly developed civilization and keeping out potential invaders from the Greek city-states. They continued to stand during the 10 years of the Trojan War, until the coalition of their Greek opponents came up with the revolutionary idea of breaching the walls from the inside. You have seen the movie, so you know what happened.

The walls of ancient Jericho, perhaps the oldest continuously occupied city in the world, came tumbling down after Joshua led his people around it once a day for six days-and on the seventh day made seven circuits, each time loudly blowing horns and shouting.

Hadrian's Wall in Britain, marking the northernmost boundary of the Roman Empire, was built in 122 AD after a visit to the worrisome frontier by the Emperor Hadrian. Running east to west for 120 km, it separated (roughly) what is now Scotland from what is now England. The wall remained effective during the rest of Hadrian's lifetime, but then, as the Romans began to withdraw to put out fires elsewhere in their vast territories, "barbarians" overran it, rendering it useless.

More recently, the Berlin wall, constructed by the Soviet Union after World War II, stood for 28 years, symbolically and literally separating East from West. 
The East German government said it was built to keep potential troublemakers out; everyone else said it was there to keep East Germans, under Soviet rule, from escaping to "the free world." In 1989, with the Soviet Union in decline, it was pulled down by Germans on both sides.
There have been many other famous walls, most of them remaining either as glorious ruins, destroyed by the "barbarians" of the moment, or by more mundane causes, time and nature: the Anastasian Wall in Turkey, the Aurelian Walls of Rome, the Western Wall of the temple in Jerusalem (known as "the Wailing Wall"), the Atlantic Wall, a grand fiasco which was supposed to have kept allied armies from overrunning Hitler's Third Reich, and so on. 

Now we are thinking it might be a good idea to erect a wall along the 1,800-mile-long Rio Grande, the natural boundary between the United States and Mexico. The reason for the wall, we are telling ourselves and the world, is to prevent smugglers of guns and drugs from entering the US, to foil would-be terrorists, to turn away workers who will take jobs away from the American people. But the real purpose of this proposed wall is the same as it was for all of history's other walls: to keep "them" out and keep "us" in, safe and secure. 
The proposed wall would be an extension of the continued militarization of our nation, a process that began, most agree, after World War II and has come into full bloom in recent years. Morris Berman, author of Dark Ages America, reminds us that in 1930 the US deployed an army that was roughly the size of Portugal's. Today, we have a quarter of a million troops and civilians stationed in 130 countries around the world. The Pentagon is America's largest company, with 5.1 million employees, 600 fixed facilities nationwide, more than 40,000 properties and 18 million acres of land.

Our mania for defense shows up throughout the culture, whether in armored-looking hummers and Jeeps (and their cousins, the SUVs) or in gated "communities"-which are not communities at all, but forts with walls and guards at the entrances. Police stand at the doors of high schools performing random searches; metal-detectors flank the entrances of corporate offices; airport security measures grow increasingly tighter and more perverse with each (invariably unfounded) terrorist scare.

What exactly is it that we are so afraid of? In a nation that has become a fortress and arsenal, we are presently at war with "terrorism." But terrorism is not an armed enemy-it is a quality, like hostility or meanness. There can be no end to such a war. Whatever else is keeping us in fear, we appear to be willing to erect a massive wall against it. Given the fates of history's other walls, however, this one is bound to fail. We might as well save ourselves the trouble and the money.

Separation must give way to community, if we are to fulfill ourselves as human beings. And to have community, we need to tear down the walls we have put up in our heads and in our hearts-and certainly not build any more walls, whether out there or in here. We have been trying to protect ourselves from the "barbarian"-the "other"-lurking in the dark out past the walls. But maybe there is no "other." Maybe what is crouching behind the leaves and darting behind the rocks is simply the dark side of ourselves, our own shadows. Maybe we are afraid of our own shadows. 

Joseph Dispenza is the award-winning author of a dozen books. His latest, God on Your Own: Finding a Spiritual Path outside Religion, is being released this month. He is a cofounder of LifePath in San Miguel. He can be reached at Joseph@LifePathRetreats.com.