Guest Author - Gina Cowley
There have been references to the Berlin Wall inasmuch as the expansion of "Tortilla Wall" pursuant to the Secure Fence Act of 2006 is concerned. Construction is underway. If you believe your distance from our southern border is lengthy enough to leave you unaffected by your country’s decision to erect a barrier of this magnitude, think again.
Presumably, all who read here have some familiarity with the differences between the Mexico/America border and those cold war circumstances surrounding the building of the Berlin Wall. If you do not, shame on you. The expansion of "Tortilla Wall" pursuant to the Act for the purpose of keeping our brothers and sisters to the South out, is analogous in some ways save the most important - Berlin’s Wall was erected to keep East German citizens in.
What says a fence about the government erecting it? What contradiction exists in a country that espouses freedom and liberty above all things – and there are differences between freedom and liberty – and yet barricades the hopeful and the hopeless from entering? East Germany’s communist government displayed no contradiction by espousing an ideal and then acting to the contrary. As more and more East Germans fled West, the communist regime with stone, cement, bricks, mortar and barbed wire firmly dictated, "you will not leave this place." Guards and guns were used against those who found ways over and under the wall, while their countrymen in the West watched in horror as people like eighty year old Olga Segler jumped from her apartment window in the East to the sidewalk below which was in the West – and to her doom. Olga Segler born July 31, 1881 and who died from injuries received a day after jumping to freedom on September 26, 1961. Olga Segler, eighty years old who wanted to be with her daughter in the West - across the sidewalk – across the line – into freedom.
What says a fence about the government erecting it? “You will not leave this place.” “You will not enter this place.” When freedom and liberty live in the hearts of women, no fence will put asunder. When mothers dream of birthing children across a line over which they see the possibility of all good things, no wall will put asunder. When old women tempt fate and attempt to live free or die in the process, no barricade will put asunder. Immigration reform and border security, albeit necessary, will not be accomplished by barricade. Olga Segler, eighty years old, who died September 26, 1961 from injuries received in her jump to freedom from a window at Bernauer Strasse 34 in Berlin. We conjure Olga Segler in our division. Wait and see.
