<p><strong>To the editor:</strong></p><p>“I am confused…”, the beginning of James Brown’s March 10 letter to the editor, is the only part of his letter I can agree with. He is confused on a least a couple of points, the first being the meaning of Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall. “Good fences make good neighbors” is the adage his neighbor uses to justify a fence where none is needed. The poem’s narrator asks,</p><p>“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it</p><p>Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.</p><p>Before I built a wall I’d ask to know</p><p>What I was walling in or walling out,</p><p>And to whom I was like to give offence.</p><p>Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,</p><p>That wants it down."</p><p>Frost was saying that such barriers alienate us from each other. If we have to resort to such impediments to community, we aren’t trying very hard to get along. In such boundaries is community lost. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”</p><p>Another confusion is one that I have struggled with since before the election and throughout the two years since. It is the bewildering confusion suffered by a majority of evangelicals that the LORD anointed Donald Trump to make things right in America. I am a committed Christian myself and so I am dispirited by the excuses, rationalizations and twisting of scripture that people of faith use to justify support for this degenerate con man. He has perverted the second greatest commandment (“love your neighbor as yourself” -Mark 12:31) into “love yourself.” That may be our president’s view, but as for me, I’ll stick with the words of Jesus.</p><p>We may take the view that our neighbors are better when hidden behind a wall, but such an attitude certainly does not make us better. Good fences will not make us good.</p><p><p><strong>Bill Kirklin</strong></p><p><p><strong>Franklin</strong></p>
