Don Trump Jr. Rants Against Hitler-Trump Comparison & Hurricanes Cause Thousands of Deaths in the Years After They Strike
What I’m Discussing Today:
Kareem’s Daily Quote: I’ve returned to my old pal Robert Frost to better understand how walls can actually bring us together.
Don Jr. Blasts Trump-Hitler Comparisons Live on TV Forgetting JD Vance Did It Himself: Don Jr. and Vance make the kind of ridiculous statements that almost make you feel sorry for them. Is it a lack of integrity, lack of intelligence, or both?
Kareem’s Video Break: An affordable robot (if you’ve got $16,000) that is a little scary. But not as scary as the human demonstrating it.
Hurricanes’ hidden toll: Thousands of deaths years after they strike: I was actually shocked by the information about the long-term devastation of hurricanes.
Severe obesity is on the rise in the US: Forty percent of Americans are obese. The costs to them personally and to the country in general are concerning.
Kareem’s Kvetching Korner: The phrase “strong woman” can actually have the opposite effect than intended.
Simon & Garfunkel Sing “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright”: The song predicts the break-up of the influential duo.
Kareem’s Daily Quote
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall
Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”
There’s a rule among writers: “Tell a dream, lose a reader.” Just as in real life, telling a dream is usually interesting only to the dreamer while the person enduring its retelling is busy plotting their escape. (By the way, writers also know that some great passages in literature are dreams. They just are warning that if you’re going to tell one, you’d better do a really good job. Gulp.)
So, I’m asking for your indulgence as I briefly recount a dream and how it led me to this quote. My dream takes place at a beach where a portly man in a disheveled suit flops down on the sand and gleefully pretends he’s doing the breaststroke. Then he takes out a photo of a young woman and waves it at me. Suddenly, there’s a short stone wall next to him that ends at his chest. On the other side is a young woman (from the photo?) and a man in their twenties lying on a beach towel. They’re fully dressed, just looking at each other happily. The portly man reaches over to touch her back and she stiffens. Immediately, I knew that he was her father and that they had been estranged for a while. The young man tells her that the portly man on the other side of the wall is making an effort. She softens and I feel a sudden surge of hope for people. At the same time, the line from Frost’s poem pops into my mind, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”
I woke up and ruminated on the dream for a while. The poem is about two neighbors meeting in spring to mend the stone wall between their land. (Read the full poem here.) The narrator wonders to himself why there is a wall in the first place because there’s nothing to wall in or out. But the neighbor isn’t a thinking man and, as he rebuilds the wall, merely repeats his father’s saying, “Good fences make good neighbors.” The meaning has always been very clear to me: the poem is a refutation of the need for “fences” between people because they keep us from sharing ourselves.
But that morning I had another idea. I thought about the title, “Mending Wall.” Maybe the wall isn’t only what keeps us apart but also what mends us. The challenge of having to overcome the fences or barriers that we erect between us and other people is what forces us to better understand ourselves and makes us more open to the needs of others. In the musical The Fantasticks, the two single dads want to have their children fall in love and get married, so they build a wall between them. Because the young couple have to find a way around the wall they fall in love. In the end, the delighted fathers decide to tear down the wall, but the wise narrator tells them, “No. Leave the wall. Remember—you must always leave the wall.” He means that the struggle to overcome the wall is what makes us examine ourselves and others to figure out how to overcome it. The wall mends us by bringing us closer.
In the non-dream world, we all have many walls—different cultures, languages, religions, habits, and beliefs—and making the effort to understand and appreciate those walls helps us to overcome them and bring us closer. The irony in the poem is that without the task of mending the wall, the two men would have never seen each other. And as each places a stone on the wall, they are interacting. They aren’t mending the wall, the wall is mending them. It’s a start.