A perfect sonnet, or one foolish line

Robert Frost is famous for many things. He was a Pulitzer-prize winning poet. He was an ardent chronicler of rural New England. He was a muse to both George R. R. Martin and Stephenie Meyers. He was a proudly hypocritical, farm-hating, fire-starting egomaniac. 

He also wrote poems that are prone to being misread and/or misremembered. The best-known and most-cited example of this is "The Road Not Taken," which many believe to be about the nobility of forging your own path, when it's more accurately characterized as a semi-sarcastic poem about the arbitrariness of choice and how we're all inclined to wrench our shoulders patting ourselves on the back as we retrospectively rationalize our choices. To the credit of the people confused by "The Road Not Taken," though, the message of the poem isn't at all obvious. Frost buried the irony of the poem so deep that even the friend he wrote the poem for didn't realize that Frost was "gently teasing" him.

A less famous example (at least to those not obsessed with The West Wing) is Frost's 1914 poem "Mending Wall." Unlike "The Road Not Taken," the meaning of "Mending Wall" is transparently clear, as obvious as a fire at an indoor poetry reading. For this reason, the case of "Mending Wall" is even more egregious: the poem originated the famous expression, "Good fences make good neighbors"; the problem is that the poem itself is explicitly about the wrongness of that expression.

This is "Mending Wall": 

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.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

[Pause to recap: Nature hates walls. The very earth repels them, grinding them down in the winter while humans aren't looking.] 

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them. 

[Okay, so, ironically, the wall brings the speaker and his neighbor together, as they meet to rebuild the crumbling wall. That's a perk of walls, I guess, although there's probably a way for the neighbors to bond that doesn't involve destroying the flesh on their hands.]

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
 
[That's kind of a jerky thing to say. The speaker tries to tell his neighbor good-naturedly that the wall isn't needed, and how does the neighbor respond? Basically, "We'd probably hate each other if this wall weren't here."] 

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
 
[Yep, the speaker sounds a little offended. But now we've got an explanation for why the neighbor is so hot on walls: the neighbor is an unenlightened savage. Only unenlightened savages feel like walls are necessary even when there aren't any cows around.] 

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."
 
[This is the end of the poem, and the plot thickens right at the close. The neighbor blindly believes in the value of fences because it's something his father said, despite all this objective evidence that fences are pointless. This is why it's important to think for yourself, children!]

So, in sum, "Good fences make good neighbors" is a phrase that Robert Frost puts in the mouth of a stubborn, willfully ignorant man entrenched in his misguided beliefs. If we want to honor the actual spirit of the poem, we should all get to work on popularizing "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." I'm not sure where we'll find applicability for that 100-year-old phrase here in 2017, but maybe something will present itself.
 

Trained and observed by a capable few

A couple years ago, in a blog post about Thanksgiving, I wrote about a weird paradox associated with being thankful. On the one hand, I noted, being thankful is an Obvious Good Thing, for Obvious Reasons. It's important to reflect on the parts of life, both little and big, for which you may not normally express gratitude: the people who worked to give you the liberties you have today, the sacrifices those people made, the better life you enjoy as a result. But on the other hand, I reasoned, taking things for granted is part of the delicious reward of the legacy of sacrifice. My ancestors toiled so that I won't have to be worried about having my suffrage rights denied. The point of struggle and sacrifice is to push future generations forward, not so that they will get to live lives free of struggle, but so that they will get to spend their lives focusing on new struggles, with the old struggles happily behind them.

In other words, I concluded, being thankful is an Obvious Good, but being unconcerned is a Non-Negligible Perk.

This paradox has been on my mind recently, as everyone on my Do-Gooder-Liberal social media feed has been in a state of near-apoplectic anxiety since Election Day. It's DEFCON-1, all the time. The good of heart cannot afford to be complacent. And truly, practically every headline I encounter reads like a dispatch from a dystopian alternate reality. The sheer volume of bad news is overwhelming. It's like getting swarmed by an entire hive of angry bees, when what you've been trained to do is focus on one bee at a time, and then take a full week to research how to most effectively deal with that bee. Or like playing Whack-a-Mole, except the mole field is the size of a city block, and all the moles have popped out at once, and 12% of the moles are wearing Klan hoods.

What I'm being told now, on my social media feed and elsewhere, is that you can never stop being vigilant about any struggle. That's what the election has taught us. Being unconcerned is a liability, not a perk. If you've ever been unconcerned, you're part of the problem. The country is regressing because you, personally, did not get involved. If the ACA gets repealed, if a Muslim registry gets created, if Planned Parenthood gets defunded, if a pointless and budget-destroying wall gets built, if Roe v. Wade gets overturned, if voting rights get restricted, if welfare and Social Security and protections for vulnerable populations are gutted, and if you and I do not actively work to prevent each and every one of these things from happening, then we must consider ourselves partially responsible. Oh God, and then there's climate change. And do we really need to be concerned about Russia? So many bees.

It's dire. Let's dial back the "everything is on fire!" feeling for a moment. What exactly do I need to be doing, personally, if I am to be a baseline-effective citizen? 

My standard answer to this question, the one that I've internalized over the course of my life, is: Be informed about issues and candidates, vote in elections both big and small, and serve on jury duty when you're called, even if you're grumpy about it.

Is this sufficient?

President Obama, whom I admire and respect, suggests that the answer is no. Nooooo. In his farewell address, he asserted that democracy "depends on our participation" and that every citizen is duty-bound to "continually try to improve this great nation of ours." Specifically, he instructed us to, at the very least, talk to strangers about what we value and why. Even better: engage in community organizing. Contribute to causes that you support in a real, tangible, "lace up your shoes" kind of way. Run for office yourself.

That Obama said this is not at all surprising. His rhetoric leans Leslie Knope. It sounds right, and it's hopeful, and it's stirring. It's consistent with what my social media feed is telling me. It also sets a bar for citizenship that I am currently failing to clear. What he's describing is certainly not what the average citizen does (i.e., ignore everything). What he's describing is also not what the average politically conscious citizen does (i.e., study the issues and vote). What he's describing is Suzie, from my post-election post: the kind of person that most of us generally view as almost suspiciously politically engaged. Obama (and my social media feed) want me to understand that I'm currently dropping the ball at citizenship, and that I need to adjust my life accordingly. In this new mode of citizenship, there is no being unconcerned, and there is no feeling content. It's the only way to manage the bees.

It sounds correct, and logical, and noble, because being aggressively engaged in citizenship is an Obvious Good. It also sounds wrong, and exhausting, and unfair, because not having to constantly worry about democracy is a Non-Negligible Perk. It's a paradox of citizenship, I guess. I'm still trying to figure out what to do.