The greatest travesties of our world seem to be about being born into lines that one has not drawn.

The accidental geographies of our births have us delineated into a way of life in a society of rules. The lines of sociopolitics sometimes harden into walls. The Berlin Wall eventually fell in 1989. Despite ourselves, in 2002 humanity built a new wall somewhere else because we’d forgotten what walls do.

Wall technology has gotten pretty mature over the lifetime of humanity. We like walls, except when we’re contained within them and we cannot breathe.

Without reflection, without mercy, without shame,
they built strong walls and high, and compassed me about.

And here I sit now and consider and despair.

It wears away my heart and brain, this evil fate:
I had outside so many things to terminate.

Oh! why when they were building could I not beware!

But never a sound of building, never an echo came.
Insensibly they drew the world and shut me out. 

C.P. Cavafy, “Walls“.

Walls are a congealing of the polarizing issues that happened because of a border, and negotiation of walls is difficult.