Do Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, or Do They Hurt Kids?
“Good fences make good neighbors.” Robert Frost reminds us of his neighbor’s long-held family belief in his famous poem Mending Wall. Every year the tradition stands; Frost and his neighbor walk the property line rebuilding the ancient fence at spring mending-time.
“Why do they make good neighbors,” Frost asks his neighbor. “Aren’t your pine trees and my apple trees a natural boundary?” But the neighbor will not go behind his father’s saying, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
The Great Wall of China, built centuries ago, protects the Chinese empire from military invasions. The Berlin Wall was used by the Eastern bloc to keep Germans from defecting and to keep others out. The DMZ, or Korean Demilitarized zone, is a 160-mile long by a 2.5-mile wide swatch of the most heavily militarized land in the world that divides North and South Korea. Walls separate Israelis and Palestinians. The US-Mexico barrier is over 600 miles of fence intended to keep illegal immigrants out of the US.
Closer to home, we build gates in communities that are restricted with key-code access, and erect fences in our neighborhoods to mark off our territory, give us privacy from our neighbors, and safety from unwanted intruders.
The logic of good fences seems indisputable. Fences keep little kids and pets within our boundaries, but more importantly, they keep the unwanted and unwelcome out.
But, who is being fenced out?
Imagine a White House with no fence. I’ve been on the outside, with hundreds of tourists pining for a glance, and I’ve been on the inside in the guided tour that was marked by its own types of barricades to keep visitors at arm’s length.
Sitting on the outside those gates, or walking through those clearly marked White House tours, reminds you that you are an outsider without much possibility of getting close to whatever is happening on the inside. Those barriers make you feel small, petty, and unimportant.
This is not a diatribe condemning all fences or borders. There are good reasons for safety, privacy, and orderly entry and exit points. The fences we build do have unintended consequences and we would do well to revisit them when spring mending-time comes around.
Our world’s physical barriers are visible reminders of invisible fences we build in our communities. Invisible fences create barriers that harm kids by keeping them from accessing opportunities in our communities.
Fencing off God’s world
Psalm 24:1 says, “The earth is the LORD’s and everything in it.” Mankind has become quite adept and creative in creating invisible fences to mark off “our” territory. We divide our world by geography with lines visible only on a map.
In 2006, my wife and I started looking at the prospect of moving to York City. Little did we know that we were transgressing a boundary a family like ours should not cross. We were strongly discouraged against moving into the city by locals and by several York County realtors. It became apparent that in this community, our type of people lived north of Route 30 or south of Country Club Road. We were strongly cautioned, with clear reference to the dangers of Black and Latino people, about the violence in the City.
I had seen this kind of voluntary segregation before. When serving as a pastor in a suburban congregation, the pastors suggested how neat it would be to have our Christmas Eve service in the city at the historic Valencia. Members were livid and protested the idea. People did not transgress those unwritten geographic boundaries, especially at night.
These invisible geographic boundaries are historic and overlaid with political policies that reinforce racial and socioeconomic segregation.
Years ago, I coached a York City Youth League basketball team. We practiced in one of the city elementary schools. The court was outdated with slick, tile floors and bent rims.
We were a traveling team that played teams all over our county. I recall traveling to a brand new basketball facility in the county. I watched as we entered that facility as the little faces of my mostly Black and brown kids lit up. They had never played in a new facility like this with its shiny wood floors, glass backboards, breakaway rims, and new bleachers.
We won by a wide margin that day, but my heart was broken. I recall with sadness at the lesson those kids learned that day: Kids that live in the suburbs play their sports in new facilities. City kids play ball on poor courts in run-down schools.
80% of the kids in the local city school district live in poverty. It creates a massive challenge for the hard-working educators in that district. This is a common story, not just in Pennsylvania, but all around the country. And we regularly cast aspersions at our urban schools for being failure factories. People just can’t understand why these schools can’t get their act together and start performing like everyone else.
When we looked at the prospect of moving into the city, we were reminded often that the district is one of the lowest-performing in the State. If we wanted better schools for our family, we would have to move to a different zip code.
The lesson is not hard to learn: good-paying jobs enable you to live in nice neighborhoods with high-performing schools; low-paying jobs restrict where you can afford to live and guarantee your kids will attend the lowest-performing schools. Everyone believes in school choice. Don’t believe me? Show me a family that does not pick their real estate based on the quality of the local schools. You can have school choice if you make enough money.
These invisible fences go virtually unchallenged although most of us would call this state of affairs an injustice.
“Good-paying jobs enable you to live in nice neighborhoods with high-performing schools; low-paying jobs restrict where you can afford to live and guarantee your kids will attend the lowest-performing schools.”
Who made these rules that force kids in poverty to attend struggling schools, while kids in the next district over go to one of the nation’s best districts? Are they intentional boundaries or just the sad, unintended consequences of bad policies?
My impulse is always to try to be charitable, to not assume the worst. On this issue, that impulse was destroyed when a friend and I scheduled a meeting with a powerful politician to propose a legislative change that would fix the problem. The politician told us, “I agree with your assessment and solution, but most of the politicians in office would be voted out by their constituents if they passed this measure.”
This created a chicken and egg dilemma for me: was the problem with bad housing and education policy the result of weak and ineffective politicians? Or, are politicians weak and ineffective in erasing these silly boundaries because the people they represent prefer that the fences be kept in place?
It was because of this injustice, that Logos Academy was founded in 1998. The founders believed that every kid was made in the image of God and possessed dignity and the ability to learn. They believed that it would be a better state of affairs if kids would learn together; white kids with Black and brown kids; kids from low-income households with kids from upwardly mobile families; urban and suburban kids in the same classrooms.
The Logos Academy’s of the world are a work-around for a moral problem that our society refuses to address.
Tearing down the fences
One of the prevailing themes of the New Testament is that God is destroying barriers that keep us from each other. I would challenge you to re-read the New Testament, especially Paul’s epistles with that theme in mind. In Ephesians 2:14, Paul writes, “For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups (Jews and Gentiles) one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.”
One of the key goals of Jesus is to unite his Jewish family with the families of the nations.
God is destroying the boundary lines that divide us.
In Galatians 2, we read an account of how Paul challenged the apostle Peter for rebuilding dividing walls that Jesus had destroyed. Peter had been eating daily with Gentiles until a Jewish group called the Judaizers showed up from Jerusalem. They taught that Jews should not mingle with Gentiles until they had been circumcised. Peter, who had learned that Jesus accepted Gentiles because of their faith in him, caved to Judaizer peer pressure.
Paul rebuked Peter in Galatians 2:14 for “not living in line with the truth of the Gospel.” Paul was reminding Peter that God had erased the old lines and that the Gospel had created new, inclusive boundaries.
Robert Frost captures this sentiment in a way that gives you the sense that even the earth we inhabit desires to erase our boundary lines of injustice:
“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…
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.”
There may be a time and place for fences, boundaries, and borders. We should be careful about erecting them and consider their unintended consequences.
Let’s not fool ourselves though. Good fences don’t make good neighbors; sometimes they hurt kids, and a good neighbor would never do that.
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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 out-door 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.’
