Barriers can divide us. But they should never define us.
In the summer of 1997, my family took a trip to Washington with my godparents and their son. While we walked the National Mall one late afternoon, my godfather noticed a lost backpack on a park bench.
Since it was the age before cell phones, we took the backpack to our hotel and called the number we found on its ID tag. This allowed us to return the backpack to its rightful owner — a very embarrassed congressional aide.
As a sign of gratitude, the aide arranged a private tour of the U.S. Capitol for us. We took the Congressional Subway from the senate office building to the Capitol itself and got a behind the scenes look at the both chambers of Congress.
Looking back now, 20 years later, this story seems even less real than it did in real time. It would be inconceivable today to pick up a lost backpack from a park bench, let alone bring it back to a hotel in order to locate its rightful owner. And of course, just about no one’s getting a behind-the-scene tour of the Capital these days.
The landscape of this story is frozen in the past, in the same way the old Western tales are eternally tied to a frontier that no longer exists. And while the advancement of technology has certainly played a part in altering our perspective, so have changes in the barriers around us.
***
I have a unique perspective on shifting barriers.
I was born in the fading shadow of the Iron Curtain. The Berlin Wall fell about a month before my second birthday, and the Cold War mentality everyone had lived with for a generation fell with it.
It was a new era. One filled with seemingly endless optimism.
That optimism flowed all the way down to elementary school classrooms. I remember learning about Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement in Kindergarten. Although the March on Washington was already 30 years in the past by then, my teachers kept talking about how the future was brighter than ever. They kept mentioning that there would be more opportunities and fewer barriers in our way.
And this was largely true. There was plenty of prosperity and innovation in America during the 1990s. We had a budget surplus for a while, and we quickly integrated the Internet into our lifestyles. An era barricaded by conflict, fear and distrust crumbled, with friendship and reconciliation filling its void.
It seemed that divisiveness would permanently become a relic of the past. Then the Twin Towers fell.
As I struggled to pick up the pieces after 9/11 — my innocence shattered and my heart broken — I noticed something different going on around me. The barriers our society had spent a decade tearing down started to appear all over the place once again.
These new barriers were evident at airports, border checkpoints and sports arenas, of course. But you could also see them in more subtle areas — such as attitudes toward minorities or reactions to abandoned backpack on a park bench. As an era of suspicion took hold, the cultural connections we’d worked so hard to build faded to grayscale.
Although the initial shock and horror of America’s darkest day soon subsided, it quickly became clear that these new barriers were here for the long haul. I remember checking in for a flight in Rome in 2004, only to notice a military sharpshooter perched overhead. It was a terrifyingly normal sight — one that reflected how an initial fear of terrorism had evolved into a societal norm.
This is not to say there haven’t been some barrier-smashing changes over the past 15 years. The invention of the smartphone and the election of a black president are testament to that. But still, it’s clear that the openness of the 1990s is as much a relic of the past as the toy in the Cracker Jack box.
The tide is most certainly rolling in.
***
This all begs one big question:
Are barriers a bad thing?
Some would say the answer is a unilateral yes. But I’d beg them to reconsider.
You see, barriers do have their benefits. They can give us privacy in our bedrooms and bathrooms. Or keep convicts away from their potential victims. Or help us define which plot of land is ours.
These are all worthy causes for boundaries. Necessary ones for our well-being and survival. After all, there is a saying that goes, “Those who wish to abolish all barriers have never spent a night in the rain.”
Still, the act of building barriers can quickly become dangerous. And our actions over the past decade or so have certainly crossed that threshold.
For in our quest to block out the danger of our world, we’ve been building a wall around our heart. And spreading seeds of deceit and distrust throughout our society.
Those seeds have grown into weeds now. They’re causing the divisiveness, anger and angst running wild through our society. They’re slowly tearing our society apart.
It’s high time that we cut these weeds down.
Let’s take some responsibility for what we’re doing to ourselves. Let’s unchain our hearts and learn to trust each other again. Let’s accept hope and shun fear.
In short, let’s start building a more open future.
That’s a shift in barriers we can all get behind.