Walls have quite a tradition

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.

        Mending Wall - Robert Frost (pubished 1914)

Our great national debate on The Wall may soon come to an end, or it may not.

So far, we have wasted tens of millions of dollars in this particular debate, but that is only a down payment on the billions of dollars it would cost to build what President Trump says is necessary to keep our nation safe.

Safe from what? Well he says it would protect us from gang members and drugs and rapists and other criminals coming through Mexico.

Not everyone agrees, of course, and all but the most radical of Trump supporters believes that another government shutdown or any other way of getting the billions of dollars to accomplish it would serve no purpose.

Critics ask where the hundreds of thousands of gang members and criminals and drug dealers and rapists who government officials say have been stopped at the border every year have gone to. After all, we aren’t building new jails fast enough to hold them all.

Government figures also say illegal crossings into our country from Mexico have been dropping every year for a decade, so the President’s supporters don’t even believe the facts coming out of Trump’s own government.

It’s enough to make your head hurt.

But, that argument doesn’t get to the point of this conversation, which is about the one thing Trump supporters and Trump haters agree on.

They both think this fight over a border wall is something new.

Not even close to the truth.

Walls have been fought over for so long that the actual details of some events are mostly lost to history.

Want proof? Go ask a rabbi, or maybe a Sunday school teacher. It’s all there in the Bible, in the book of Joshua.

Remember the story? After Moses led his people out of Egypt and they wandered in the desert until a whole sinful generation died off, the Lord promised the Hebrews a gift - a land flowing with milk and honey.

And He gave it to them. God led them to Jericho, a wealthy walled city and ancient trade center, built to protect the people who were already living in that land of mink and honey. And, the  Hebrews couldn’t get in.

They were the people Donald Trump is talking about. They wanted to take the land from its owners, and would commit any crime to get it. But the wall stopped them.

So, God had the ancient Hebrews march around the walls of Jericho for seven days, blowing trumpets. They did, it fell, and the people in the city were slaughtered. There are lots of theological arguments over just why that happened.

There is also some scientific research showing that the ancient city was indeed destroyed. Archeologists say there is evidence of an earthquake and a fire, which supports some of those theological arguments.

But, no doubt about it, this was the first time we know of that a thriving city built a wall to keep out people who wanted to steal from them. Which makes it the first example of a big wall that didn’t work.

Now there are so many examples of walls that failed to keep enemies out that it’s hardly worth mentioning them. 

Think of the great Greek city state of Troy, and the Trojan horse. Or of the ancient city of Constantinople with its epic series of walls, which fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, shocking all of Christendom and marking the end of the Middle Ages.

The best would probably be the Great Wall of China, which runs more than 1,700 miles and took more than two centuries to build. It kept out refugees and armies, and its great doors let in merchants who paid the local tariffs to bring in their goods. And when it was breached by Genghis Kahn, it led to the downfall of a Chinese dynasty,

Now let’s jump ahead nearly 500 years, to the time before World War II, when French Minister of Defense Andre Maginot  created a massive barrier of more than 500 forts along the borders of Germany and Italy, with bunkers up to six stories deep. The German army never actually broke through the wall, although they went over it and around it in a massive blitzkrieg.

 Then it was Adolph Hitler’s turn to build his Atlantic Wall, a barrier constructed over several years with slave labor and enough concrete to build 1,100 Yankee Stadiums. He had tanks and guns and soldiers. Then came D-Day and the end of Hitler’s dream of a fortress Europe.

By now, you should be saying that the wall President Trump is talking about isn’t meant to stop an army - forget for a moment the drug dealers who use airplanes, ships and even submarines to get across the border - but just illegal immigrants and drug dealers and people selling women and children into a live of slavery.

Well, there was a place in the modern era where a big wall was put up to stop people from crossing from one state to another, a big wall of concrete and barbed wire, with guard towers and land mines and searchlights and lots and lots of troops with orders to shoot to kill.

It was called the Berlin Wall, and it defined East Germany as a corrupt and decaying state in the grasp of a petty dictator who cared nothing for human life.

And, by the way, while numbers are still hard to get, we are pretty sure that around 5,000 people went over the wall, under the wall and through the wall at checkpoints between 1961 and 1989. You couldn’t go around it, since it went all around East Berlin.

There were also about 100 people killed trying to get across that wall. Its legacy of shame still endures.

And walls are still a popular way of protecting a border, even if they don’t always work. Now Israel has a wall which President Trump says is 99.9 percent effective in stopping illegal crossings. 

The Israeli government says the same thing - it’s where he gets his figure - but they say it is 99.9 percent effective is stopping terrorist attacks.

But they also have a very efficient counter-intelligence operation on the other side of the wall to detect potential attacks, and every year the criticism of the Israeli government about its walls (there are several) and its policies toward the Palestinians grows.

Now, depending on where you look, there are 20 or 40 or 60 or more nations that are currently building walls to keep out migrants or immigrants or refugees or enemies of one sort or another.

Some are needed, and some do offer protection. Some work well, and some don’t work well at all. Some Canadians have proposed building a border wall to keep out any United States citizens fleeing from Donald Trump.

So, as your national debate over Trump’s border wall continues, here are a few things to keep in mind.

• If it never gets finished, it will be seen as a monument to failure, one which cost $50 or $60 or maybe $100 billion dollars, once all the costs (including land condemnation) are sorted out by the courts over the next decade or so,

• If it does get finished, the cost of patrolling the wall and maintaining the wall and having people working to keep other people from going over or under or through it will take up an ever-ever-larger part of the federal budget, which will almost certainly result in cuts to the military or social security or other programs.

* Unlike other political talking points that eventually fade away even though they remain huge problem - things like the ever-growing national debt, climate change and economic inequality - the Trump Wall will always be right there, in plain sight, a symbol of everything that he and the Republicans who support him are bringing to our nation.