Are You Putting Up Walls or Building Bridges?
I war against you
You war against me…
- “Border Wall” by Michelle Rhea Goddard
On May 27, 2020, I read an article that seemed to sum up the sentiments in our country at the time. That article and some lyrics that I had already been chewing on became the basis for my latest single, “Border Wall.”
The death and destruction that we experienced as a nation and as a people, was truly on another level in 2020. I think it is easy to say that not one person in the U.S. has not in some way, shape, or form been impacted by Covid, either through loss of a loved one, loss of a job, loss of normalcy; there has been a loss in all forms from this virus. What perhaps was not anticipated was the loss of any semblance of human decency. While I was in Nashville sitting in my apartment thinking about and observing life at that time, I watched people in my town, which only a few weeks earlier had come together to help each other during the horrendous tornadoes, start to tear each other down rather than build each other up. What could cause such a shift in opinion and lack of seeing your neighbor as yourself?
I feel like I'm battling society
Humanity is raging
Inside of me
Can't I just breathe
Feeling it all up
Inside of me
All choked up
Suffocating instead of loving
- “Border Wall”
The phrase ‘border wall’ kept coming to mind because it spoke to the barricades that communities were used to isolate and alienate others that did not agree with their points of view. I’ve never in my lifetime seen anything like the divisiveness that happened during the summer of 2020. What I wanted to understand is, given the mudslinging and arrows being lobbed at one another, how do we start to piece and stitch these communities back together again?
I started writing “Border Wall” as a commentary on how we got to this point and a hard reflection on what will continue to happen if we don't change and start to come together again. The irony of life is that we all want the same basic liberties and freedoms but when you give power to a few, the many suffer.
It says on the dollar
In God we trust
A penny doesn't lie
Neither do my words
If the sparrow speaks
How many people gotta die
Before we get to fly?
- “Border Wall”
And I say this not with a political agenda but rather through the lens of the Bible, interestingly enough. There have been numerous examples of kings that deceived and went against God's wishes and the whole community suffered as a result.
Woe to him who builds his house with unrighteousness
and his chambers with injustice,
who uses his neighbor’s services without wages,
and gives him nothing for his work,
who says, “I will build myself a roomy house
and large chambers,”
and cuts out its windows,
paneling it with cedar
and painting it with vermilion.
But your eyes and your heart
are intent only on your covetousness
and on shedding innocent blood
and on oppression and violence.
- Jeremiah 22:13-14, 17 (Modern English Version)
For all of us to be free, we really all have to be free and the power needs to be distributed equally amongst all where everyone is seen and heard, not just a few at the top. Where the people's people actually represent the people and not special interests. Where humanity can say you've done a good job at the end of the day rather than what has been happening lately where the good job is measured in how many people can be deceived or power stripped away. In my humble opinion, nobody likes to be imprisoned or controlled by another, when you feel like your voice is being silenced by a machine that you cannot control, tensions mount until they get to the boiling point of which we've seen over the last 18 months.
Can I look at you
And you look at me
Through everything that
You
You don't see
Seeing me
Don't we all just want to be free?
- “Border Wall”
To get back to the state, or perhaps for the first time, who knows, where we actually can have all voices being heard and seen, and strip away this divisiveness that we've created as a result of a power struggle is to realize that at the end of the day we all die and then who has the power? Really?
While you may win the fight
On this side of Life
I pray that you find a way
To the other side
Through the dandelion fluff
And dust
As they say
Dust to dust and
Ashes to ashes
- “Border Wall”