walls
for Arizona, Israel, and all the other wall builders ... The street is as filthy as it is abandoned. The clouds foretell rain. And the wind bristles, sending shivers along my spine. If you walk the "peace walls" of Belfast you can smell the failure. The failure of community, of leadership, of religion, of humanity. It is all written beneath the grubby graffiti on the cold concrete that long ago replaced the si mpler fences, and then began to climb higher. Because once you build a wall, you quickly discover that it cannot truly be high enough. I have many times walked the seventeenth century's attempt to separate Catholics and Protestants along Protestantism's frontier on the River Foyle. Those walls are massive. Carved stone. Incredibly thick. Powerfully armed. You can walk along the top of these walls today, Europe's last truly walled city, and look down on what was once a Catholic ghetto and what was once a battlefield where the native soldiers of Ir...