Midway in my bike ride this morning, in a conversation with my friend Clyde at a favorite coffee shop, and later with friend Adam at the same coffee shop, we talked again about the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. The world waits and wonders how it will end. Other former republics of the old Soviet Union, now independent states,  are watching with bated breath for an outcome.  Last month Estonia and Russia finally signed a treaty settling a border dispute.  Eastern European nations remember vividly the conflict between Georgia and Russia over the breakaway region of South Ossetia, a dispute that still hasn’t been resolved to the satisfaction of any of the groups involved. The Chechen-Russian conflicts in the North Caucasus region date back at least to the 18th Century.  Relations between Russia and Moldova have been strained for many years.  Russia has a military presence in Moldova against the will of the Moldovan Government. Other tensions exist which may not ever be resolved to the satisfaction of everybody.

I live fifteen miles up the road from one of the most notorious walls in the world, the border fence between the United States and Mexico. It is designed to keep people out of the United States. The border crossing at San Ysidro and Tijuana, where individuals are scrutinized for appropriate papers, is the busiest in the world.  We have no equivalent border fence between the United States and Canada.  This writing is not meant as commentary on immigration issues but is done as a reminder that disputes over borders between countries and regions within countries have been the source of conflict that can erupt suddenly into war. My country has a history of border conflicts going back to the Revolutionary War. The American Civil War was fought from 1861 to 1865 resulting in the deaths of almost 800,000 soldiers and an undetermined number of civilians. My grandfather, Abraham Miles, was born in 1868 just three years after the end of that war; and I knew him well. He died in 1964 when I was twenty-nine years old.  My mother’s grandmother was from a Cherokee Indian tribe in Oklahoma.  That lady, my Great-grandmother, was the daughter of parents who survived the forced march from their homeland in the East over what became known as the Trail of Tears.  They and other Native American were forced off their land by an act of Congress known as the Removal Act of 1830.

When I was a boy, 127,000 United States citizens were imprisoned in America during World War II  because their ethnicity was Japanese. It’s a sobering reality to know that injustice happened in my country, not in some distant past, but in my lifetime.  I could go on here with a long litany of examples of casual social-cultural discrimination and officially sanctioned injustices against groups of people in my country, but that is not the purpose of this writing either.  My journal writing for today serves as a reminder to myself and to anyone else who is paying attention to what is happening in Eastern Europe that the record of human activity on this planet which we call world history is long list of border conflicts.  

I very much like being retired, but there are times when I'd like to be working again, to be in a classroom with mostly willing and eager students looking for wisdom in a short story, a novel, or a poem.  I’d like to ask them to listen and follow along as I read to them Robert Frost’s “The Mending Wall.”  I’d love to hear students talk about how the poem relates to the Ukranian-Russian conflict this week and to the U.S.-Mexican border fence issues here where we live.

Mending Wall

by Robert Frost 

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs.  The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,

One on a side.  It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

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.'

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

'Why do they make good neighbors?  Isn't it

Where there are cows?  But here there are no cows.

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 offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.'  I could say 'Elves' to him,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself.  I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'

My photo du jour celebrates the visit of friend Dorothy's grand daughter Julie, in the middle of this group of good neighbors, who is visiting from Japan. Julie and her two brothers enjoy dual citizenship... Japan and United States of America.