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A Boomer’s Journal

By Tom Anselm

(Editors note: This column went to press at a time when the St. Louis County grand jury had yet to announce its findings.)

They gray skies have come to us early this year. Looking out the window of our second-floor bedroom, it almost looks like January. A similar gloom has descended on our region as well, as we sit in anticipation of the results of a grand jury investigation the likes of which few of us have ever experienced.

This moment in our time will forever be ingrained in the hearts and minds of everyone who lives in our area, and even many of those in other parts of the community. Few have no opinion. The range is from adamantly for one side to just as adamantly for the other on the shooting of Michael Brown by Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson. There is some in-between, but not much, at least from what I read, things I hear, people I talk with. Which brings me to the image of walls.

Just recently, the free world celebrated the demise of one of the most famous of these of the 20^th century, the Berlin Wall. This was a barrier set up in 1961 by the Soviet occupiers of East Berlin, ostensibly to “keep the Fascists out.” Of course, it served mostly to keep those seeking freedom from Communist oppression in. It stood until 1981. Twenty years it stood, a palpable symbol of hatred. It was a metaphorical extension of the division that the capital of Germany experienced at the end of World War II when the victorious Allied Forces divvied up the spoils.   As a kid, I remember hearing the term ‘Iron Curtain,’ and at first, I took it literally to mean a huge curtain somehow strung across Eastern Europe. I came to know of the real meaning, and felt something like this would always be the way it was in that part of the world. I was wrong.

There are walls in the Holy Land. The Western Wall, or Wailing Wall, is the most sacred site for the Jewish people, part of the ancient wall of the first Jewish Temple. But just around the corner in Jerusalem there are walls between the Palestinian and Jewish neighborhoods. Not-so-holy walls, these.

In our country, there are many who feel like a wall is needed across our entire border with Mexico. Maybe we should hire the Chinese as consultants. They seem to know how to build long walls. Just writing these words shows how ludicrous is this idea.

In his poem “Mending Wall”, Robert Frost was musing about the value of a wall. He said, “Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out and to whom I was likely to give offense.” His farmer said “Good walls make good neighbors.” I wonder.

There are figurative walls in our society. Walls that have been built brick by invisible brick for decades, nay, centuries, that locally have been re-cemented and patched so as to keep two sides separated. I find myself hiding behind them, on one side usually. Not wanting to cross over, but not happy at all with what they stand for. Or completely comfortable with where I am standing.

When I was a kid in the ‘60s and ‘70s, I thought things were changing for the better. And maybe they did, for awhile. Black people began to get a better shake in the country, the civil rights legislation helping along the way. I was hopeful.

Is the tragic death of yet another young black man finally going to be the catalyst to set in motion significant movement on all sides that will chip at those walls that just seem to be getting higher and thicker and stronger? It seems that a great many political and community leaders are meeting and symposium-ing and conferencing and having all sorts of statements issued and saying they will do this or that. If it works, hurrah for them.

But I am a skeptic at best and cynic at worst, and remember the past.

Maybe it all comes down to this: what does it take to change a person’s heart? One person, then another, and still another, until we all or at least so many more of us have the courage to step around or under or over that wall and take the other’s hand.

Thoughts from one whose heart is in need, on a gray and gloomy day in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

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