U.S. fence at border is an emblem of failure

Fences are never the best answer. I understand they are needed at times. But I also understand when a fence or a wall goes up, it often means human relationships have broken down. As with plane crashes and errant golf shots, the need for a wall can usually be traced to some sort of human error.

So with the fence going up along the border between the United States and Mexico.

This week, 55 members of the Utah National Guard have been working double time to wall up the Arizona border. By all reports, it is a sturdy, well-built, metal barricade. It's not pretty — and it shouldn't be. It's there to do a job, because at some point, people were unable to get the job done without it.

The fence is an emblem of our failure.

I can understand why the barrier has to be put in place.

What troubles me is the self-satisfaction some people are displaying about it. Congressmen have paraded to the podium to pontificate about the wall. Many of them have quoted Robert Frost's poem, "Mending Wall," crowing: "Good fences make good neighbors."

The poem does indeed say that.

But anyone who has read the poem knows that Frost isn't the one who says it.

In the poem, Frost and his sturdy New England neighbor get together to mend the rock wall that divides their properties. The poem begins with a riddle, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." As they walk along, Frost chides the other man.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

But the old Yankee farmer who — Frost says — moves in a darkness that is "not of woods only or the shade of trees," will only repeat his father's saying: "Good fences make good neighbors."

He says it without thinking, as if an appeal to tradition is enough to trump everything else — creativity, imagination, enlightenment.

Toward the end, Frost repeats his own refrain: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall."

That something, he tells us, is the icy earth that sends a "frozen ground-swell" and "spills the upper boulders in the sun."

The reader is left to solve the little riddle for himself.

And, it turns out, the thing that "doesn't love a wall" and wants it down is frozen water: "Frost."