Dividing Fence Quotes

When my husband had an affair with someone else I watched his eyes glaze over when we ate dinner together and I heard him singing to himself without me, and when he tended the garden it was not for me. He was courteous and polite; he enjoyed being at home, but in the fantasy of his home I was not the one who sat opposite him and laughed at his jokes. He didn't want to change anything; he liked his life. The only thing he wanted to change was me. It would have been better if he had hated me, or if he had abused me, or if he had packed his new suitcases and left. As it was he continued to put his arm round me and talk about being a new wall to replace the rotten fence that divided our garden from his vegetable patch. I knew he would never leave our house. He had worked for it. Day by day I felt myself disappearing. For my husband I was no longer a reality, I was one of the things around him. I was the fence which needed to be replaced. I watched myself in the mirror and saw that I was mo longer vivid and exciting. I was worn and gray like an old sweater you can't throw out but won't put on. He admitted he was in love with her, but he said he loved me. Translated, that means, I want everything. Translated, that means, I don't want to hurt you yet. Translated, that means, I don't know what to do, give me time. Why, why should I give you time? What time are you giving me? I am in a cell waiting to be called for execution. I loved him and I was in love with him. I didn't use language to make a war-zone of my heart. 'You're so simple and good,' he said, brushing the hair from my face. He meant, Your emotions are not complex like mine. My dilemma is poetic. But there was no dilemma. He no longer wanted me, but he wanted our life Eventually, when he had been away with her for a few days and returned restless and conciliatory, I decided not to wait in my cell any longer. I went to where he was sleeping in another room and I asked him to leave. Very patiently he asked me to remember that the house was his home, that he couldn't be expected to make himself homeless because he was in love. 'Medea did,' I said, 'and Romeo and Juliet and Cressida, and Ruth in the Bible.' He asked me to shut up. He wasn't a hero. 'Then why should I be a heroine?' He didn't answer, he plucked at the blanket. I considered my choices. I could stay and be unhappy and humiliated. I could leave and be unhappy and dignified. I could Beg him to touch me again. I could live in hope and die of bitterness. I took some things and left. It wasn't easy, it was my home too. I hear he's replaced the back fence.

In 1965, a psychologist named Martin Seligman started shocking dogs. He was trying to expand on the research of Pavlov--the guy who could make dogs salivate when they heard a bell ring. Seligman wanted to head in the other direction, and when he rang his bell, instead of providing food, he zapped the dogs with electricity. To keep them still, he restrained them in a harness during the experiment. After they were conditioned, he put these dogs in a big box with a little fence dividing it into two halves. He figured if the dog rang the bell, it would hop over the fence to escape, but it didn't. It just sat there and braced itself. They decided to try shocking the dog after the bell. The dog still just sat there and took it. When they put a dog in the box that had never been shocked before or had previously been allowed to escape and tried to zap it--it jumped the fence. You are just like these dogs. If, over the course of your life, you have experienced crushing defeat or pummeling abuse or loss of control, you convince yourself over time that there is no escape, and if escape is offered, you will not act--you become a nihilist who trusts futility above optimism. Studies of the clinically depressed show that they often give in to defeat and stop trying. . . Any extended period of negative emotions can lead to you giving in to despair and accepting your fate. If you remain alone for a long time, you will decide loneliness is a fact of life and pass up opportunities to hang out with people. The loss of control in any situation can lead to this state. . . Choices, even small ones, can hold back the crushing weight of helplessness, but you can't stop there. You must fight back your behavior and learn to fail with pride. Failing often is the only way to ever get the things you want out of life. Besides death, your destiny is not inescapable.

Divided, cut up by borders, frontiers, fences and prohibitions, our wretched planet flew on, spinning into the icy emptiness of space, toward the sharp pinpoints of those stars --and nowhere on its surface was there a place where someone was not keeping someone else behind bars; where one lot of prisoners, helped by other prisoners, was not guarding a third set of prisoners --and themselves-- against the risk of taking an undesirable, lethally dangerous gulp of the bright blue air of freedom.

We divide the world -to stop us feeling frightened- into wrong and into right, into black and into white, into real men and fairies, into status quo and scary. We divide the world into terrorists and heroes, into normal folk and weirdos, into good people and pedos, yeah we want the world binary, binary, but it's not that simple. We divide the world into liberals and gun-freaks, into atheists and fundies, into teetotallers and junkies, into chemical and natural, into fictional and factual, into science and supernatural, but it's actually, naturally, not that white and black The more you know, the harder you will find it, to make up your mind, and it doesn't really matter if you find you can't see which grass is greener -chances are it's neither- and either way it's easier to see the difference when you're sitting on the fence -cause it's not that simple- From: The Fence (An Anthem to Ambivalence)

I’ve been in the Wilds for a month and a half now, and in that time I’ve almost forgotten about the fences. It’s amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.

I thought about all the fences that get built in this world - the ones that divide folks and tear them up, like the actions of the Kaiser and his henchmen, and the ones that bring folks closer together, like this stretch of fence Karl Mueller had build for me.

Those same three factors applied to human beings. Like bees, our ancestors were (1) territorial creatures with a fondness for defensible nests (such as caves) who (2) gave birth to needy offspring that required enormous amounts of care, which had to be given while (3) the group was under threat from neighboring groups. For hundreds of thousands of years, therefore, conditions were in place that pulled for the evolution of ultrasociality, and as a result, we are the only ultrasocial primate. The human lineage may have started off acting very much like chimps,48 but by the time our ancestors started walking out of Africa, they had become at least a little bit like bees. And much later, when some groups began planting crops and orchards, and then building granaries, storage sheds, fenced pastures, and permanent homes, they had an even steadier food supply that had to be defended even more vigorously. Like bees, humans began building ever more elaborate nests, and in just a few thousand years, a new kind of vehicle appeared on Earth—the city-state, able to raise walls and armies.49 City-states and, later, empires spread rapidly across Eurasia, North Africa, and Mesoamerica, changing many of the Earth’s ecosystems and allowing the total tonnage of human beings to shoot up from insignificance at the start of the Holocene (around twelve thousand years ago) to world domination today.50 As the colonial insects did to the other insects, we have pushed all other mammals to the margins, to extinction, or to servitude. The analogy to bees is not shallow or loose. Despite their many differences, human civilizations and beehives are both products of major transitions in evolutionary history. They are motorboats.

Borders crumble; they won’t hold together on their own; we have to shore them up constantly. They are fortified and patrolled by armed guards, these fences that divide a party of elegant diners on one side from the children on the other whose thin legs curve like wishbones, whose large eyes peer through the barbed wire at so much food—there is no wall high enough to make good in such a neighborhood. For this, of course, is what the fences divide.

The crude reality is that we are in a concentration camp: all kids, different ages, different sizes, and different skin colors. We are divided from the outside world by a big electric fence and united with each other by fear, hunger, and the hope to stay alive until the war ends and somebody will grant us freedom. “Joshy, it’s time for us to get inspected. The guards will check how big and strong we are,” I declare, with fake joy. I gaze down at my little brother, the only family I have left. His brown eyes are a deep chocolate swirl; his mouth is curved into a timid smile. His soiled blond hair is flowing around his face like a lion’s mane.

Prayer is one of the few spiritual practices that is pointless unless God is real. Meditation calms the body whether or not there's a spiritual being receiving our deliberate breathing and clear mind. Reading sacred texts aligns us with the wisdom of our ancestors whether or not it was divinely inspired. Church attendance connects us to the needs of our community. Fasting cleanses the body of toxic substances. Resting on Sundays allows us to let go of stress and worry. But prayer? Taking time to pour out our needs and our anxieties, demanding change, confessing sin, crying out for help - all of these things depend upon the existence of God, and specifically the existence of a God who hears and responds to our cries. Prayer in the face of insurmountable problems is an admission of weakness and need. Prayer is a commitment to a better future, a sign of faith that the world will one day be made right. Prayer is an act that emerges out of helplessness. Prayer is an act of hope.

But the creator of things,------1890 nature herself, was the first example of sowing seed and the start of grafting, for berries and acorns fell down from trees and, in due season, produced underneath a crowd of seedlings. Then from nature, too, they got the idea of setting young shoots into branches and planting new saplings in the ground through all their fields. After that, they kept trying various ways of tilling pleasant fields and saw that with tender care------1900 and gentle cultivation earth would tame wild fruits. Day by day, men forced the forests to move further up the mountains, yielding------[1370] lower parts to farming, so they could have meadows, lakes, streams, grain fields, and rich vineyards on hills and plains, and dark bands of olives could run between, marking the divisions, spreading over hillocks, plains, and valleys, just as you now see all land divided with various fine things—men make it shine------1910 by arranging sweet orchard trees in rows, and, with fertile shrubs planted all around, keep them fenced in.

On April 1, 1865, in Virginia, Pickett was defending an intersection known as Five Forks, six miles south of the Appomattox River and a good bit closer to the Southside Railroad, the last remaining supply line to Richmond. While thirty thousand Union troops led by Little Phil Sheridan approached from the southeast, Pickett’s twelve thousand, spread two miles wide behind fences and in ditches, braced to meet them. Pickett’s supreme commander, Robert E. Lee, was headquartered ten miles away, near Petersburg. Should Pickett fall to Sheridan, Lee would be forced from Petersburg, the Federals would capture Richmond, and the Confederate cause would be lost. Someone mentioned shad. The spring spawning run was in full penetration of the continent. The fish were in the rivers. Tom Rosser, another Confederate general, had caught some, and on the morning of April 1st ordered them baked for his midday dinner, near Hatcher’s Run, several miles from Five Forks. He invited Pickett and Major General Fitzhugh Lee, nephew of Robert E. Lee, to join him. Pickett readily accepted, and rode off from his battle station with Lee. The historian Shelby Foote continues the narrative (“The Civil War,” vol. 3, p. 870): “Neither told any subordinate where he was going or why, perhaps to keep from dividing the succulent fish too many ways; with the result that when the attack exploded—damped from their hearing, as it was, by a heavy stand of pines along Hatcher’s Run—no one knew where to find them. Pickett only made it back to his division after half its members had been shot or captured, a sad last act for a man who gave his name to the most famous charge in a war whose end was hastened by his threehour absence at a shad bake.

Wealthier parents remove their kids from public and sequester them somewhere with a guest list and a cover charge. Mose uses the term “enclosure”—which is when a public or common resource is fenced and privatized. The territory of kids’ play used to be a commons, and now it’s been divided up into tiny, guarded pieces.

There was too much history he’d like to forget, but his memories were on the surface today, closer even than the woman across from him. For a single heartbeat the shop faded and Slocan appeared: huts in rows, men and women like cattle within its fenced boundaries.

We spent countless dinner conversations talking about a move away from whiteness, away from country clubs and catered dinner parties and classrooms with fifteen students discussing literature around large wooden tables. A group of Peter’s closest friends from college had moved to a predominantly African American, low-income neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia, and we thought we might join them. Those friends—a multiracial group that included white men as well as men with families from Haiti, Sri Lanka, and India—had all been involved in efforts to acknowledge the historical racial divides within the church in America, and they wanted to participate in building bridges of reconciliation. They also had wanted to live near each other, and they had prayed for an inner-city community where people of color invited them into the neighborhood. Now, a decade later, two friends worked as doctors in the city, one served as a copastor of a multiethnic church, two taught school, one ran a nonprofit to connect kids in the neighborhood to the outdoors. We took our family to Richmond to visit those friends one summer.

Winston Churchill, who himself crossed and re-crossed the fence line of partisan politics, said much the same thing: ‘It is not the individual I attack; it is the system. It is not the man who is bad; it is the law which is bad. It is not the man who is blameworthy for doing what the law allows and what other men do; it is the state which would be blameworthy if it were not to endeavour to reform the law and correct the practice.

The United Nations has often defined culture as being created, contested, and recreated within the social praxis of diverse groups in economic, social, and political arenas. There is no point to segregation — to further an invisible line dividing Christians and Muslims. Just as men need to stand up for women in gender rights, Catholics must stand with our Muslim brothers and sisters for sustainable peace. We must be the first to oppose whenever Muslims are branded and discriminated against. As the old Chinese proverb say — Just as a fence has to be built with pegs, an able person needs the help of three others.” - Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo , Night Owl: A Nationbuilder’s Manual 2nd Edition (p. 232, Surpassing the invisible line)

 This union of two natures in Christ's one Person is doubtless one of the greatest mysteries of the Christian religion. It needs to be carefully stated. It is just one of those great truths which are not meant to be curiously pried into, but to be reverently believed. Nowhere, perhaps, shall we find a more wise and judicious statement than in the second article of the Church of England. "The Son, who is the Word of the Father, begotten from everlasting of the Father, the very and eternal God, and of one substance with the Father, took man's nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin of her substance--so that two whole and perfect natures, that is to say, the Godhead and the manhood, were joined together in one Person, never to be divided, whereof is one Christ, truly God and truly man." This is a most valuable declaration. This is "sound speech, which cannot be condemned."                But while we do not pretend to explain the union of two natures in our Lord Jesus Christ's Person, we must not hesitate to fence the subject with well-defined cautions. While we state most carefully what we do believe, we must not shrink from declaring boldly what we do not believe. We must never forget, that though our Lord was God and man at the same time, the divine and human natures in Him were never confounded. One nature did not swallow up the other. The two natures remained perfect and distinct. The divinity of Christ was never for a moment laid aside, although veiled. The manhood of Christ, during His life-time, was never for a moment unlike our own, though by union with the Godhead, greatly dignified. Though perfect God, Christ has always been perfect man from the first moment of His incarnation. He who is gone into heaven, and is sitting at the Father's right hand to intercede for sinners, is man as well as God. Though perfect man, Christ never ceased to be perfect God. He that suffered for sin on the cross, and was made sin for us, was "God manifest in the flesh." The blood with which the Church was purchased, is called the blood "of God." (Acts 20:28.) Though He became "flesh" in the fullest sense, when He was born of the Virgin Mary, He never at any period ceased to be the Eternal Word.

The Platoon’s training facility was a low cinder-block building at the edge of a fenced grass field. The building was divided into two small offices and a makeshift kennel, where dogs could be penned between sessions. The Platoon’s daily shift didn’t begin until mid-afternoon, but several black-and-white K-9 cars already dotted the parking lot. A lone Bomb Detection K-9 truck stood out among them like a rhino among cattle. Scott

It comes down to the unresolved question of whether gays are exactly like everybody else other than in one single characteristic. Or whether that single characteristic makes gays utterly unlike the rest of society. It is a divide which falls into two broad camps. In the first are those who believe that gays are – and should be – just like everybody else. That they will win any and all remaining rights battles by demonstrating that nothing makes them different from their heterosexual friends and neighbours. Just like straight people, gays can live in houses with nice picket fences, can marry, have monogamous relationships and eventually produce and raise children like everybody

That's the thing with fences, though—where properties touch, only on person has to create a divide for both to feel the separation.

Once again, the fence creates the crime.

Our perceptions are also way off. Today Democrats and Republicans imagine that almost twice as many people on the other side of the political fence hold more extreme views than really do.11 And the more media we consume, including newspapers, social media, talk radio, and local news, the more our views become divorced from reality. We are also paying less careful attention to the specifics of the issues that divide us—such as health care, immigration, and gun control—opting instead to blindly follow what we are told by our party leaders.12

Americans have gone from an average of 3.2 close friends to 1.8, and 40 percent of our neighbors have fewer than one confidant in their lives.6 He went on to say that Americans used to be able to disagree with one another and still be friends because we were friends first. But with our collapse of social capital—of neighbors gathering on the porch or chatting over the backyard fence—cultural polarization has become an epidemic in this country, creating a great divide between races, classes, and genders. One obvious byproduct of this relational separation is loneliness.

The United Nations has often defined culture as being created, contested, and recreated within the social praxis of diverse groups in economic, social, and political arenas. There is no point to segregation — to further an invisible line dividing Christians and Muslims. Just as men need to stand up for women in gender rights, Catholics must stand with our Muslim brothers and sisters for sustainable peace. We must be the first to oppose whenever Muslims are branded and discriminated against. As the old Chinese proverb say — Just as a fence has to be built with pegs, an able person needs the help of three others.

I have always been honest with you, Ros. I invited you into my world, into my family home. I didn’t do it to make you feel guilty. I did it because I’m trying to love you.’ ‘I didn’t tell you about my family, because I am trying to love you back,’ I said. ‘That makes no sense, Ros.’ ‘It does make sense if you think about it. Love is the easy part of this equation, Paris, don’t you see. I love your face. I love your personality. I love your company. I love talking to you.’ ‘But,’ he interjected. ‘But, no matter how much I love you, I know that we will always be divided by the colour fence.' ‘Apartheid is ending, Ros.’ ‘You know as well as I do that the philosophical divide will remain long after it is physically removed.

You can build something new, one person, one relationship, one meal at a time. You can build friendships instead of watering the flowers alongside our long-held fences. You can choose to believe in the unshakable goodness of those across the Pew or political divide. You can choose fierce kindness by speaking the truth to people about the impact their decisions make on the vulnerable. You can call Self Supremacy the liar it is. It's a bait and switch.

HOW DOES THIS RADICAL conceptual divide over whether Judaism is a religion or an ethnicity play out in relations between the two communities? One manifestation is the lack of political cooperation between Israeli and American Jewish progressives. Though right-of-center American Jews are often active in supporting Israel’s right-leaning parties and offer financial support through American Friends of Likud and other organizations, there has been surprisingly little alignment between liberal American Jews and the Israeli political left.* There is, of course, some American organizational support for Israel’s left-leaning parties, but the relationship on the left is not nearly as vigorous as it is on the right. Why is that? Once again, the answer lies largely in the Judaism-as-religion issue, which makes it difficult for the two communities to understand each other. Einat Wilf—a secular and unabashedly nationalist former Knesset member and outspoken voice for liberal causes—is a compelling example of how Judaism-as-religion versus Judaism-as-nation creates a disconnect between the two communities. In 2018, she published a book titled The War over the Right of Return, in which she argues that the fundamental reason the Israeli-Arab conflict has never been settled has been Israel’s refusal to reject outright the Palestinian demand for a “right of return” of 1948 refugees and their descendants.* The fact that millions of Palestinians still harbor a hope of returning to “Palestine,” argues Wilf, leaves open in their minds the possibility that Israel as a Jewish nation-state can still be ended. End that charade, she argues, and one major obstacle on the road to settling the conflict will have been removed. What matters for us is not whether Wilf’s analysis is right or wrong. What we need to note is that there is scarcely an American Jewish liberal who would dare speak aloud about denying the Palestinian right of return once and for all. How does Wilf straddle the fence, some might ask? How can she be both a liberal and such a committed nationalist? To Wilf, as to many Israelis, there is simply no fence to straddle. For many Israeli progressives like her, there is no tension at all between liberal values and Judaism-as-nation. But for American Jews who see themselves primarily as a religion and not a nation, Wilf’s value set is a much more difficult position to adopt. The disconnect is between Judaism-as-justice and Judaism-as-survival. Those are obviously not always incompatible, but they are profoundly different instincts.

Besides, I've noticed that only a thin line divides the insane from the rest of the population. I was reminded of how a cat will freeze on a fence with one paw drawn up, to see if you are friend or foe. To turn me ladylike might have rendered me useless and possibly ornamental. Then I would not be able to fend for myself. The public does not mind being cheated, but they like it to be convincing. The truth is too much for some people and too little for others. In this life you take what people are willing to give. No more. No less. New York is a place where everybody has their hands out for your money. In a savage world we have to cling to whatever small pleasures and niceties we can devise. I could have done better and I might have done worse. But that's true of life in general. It's a strange thing about the public. They'll believe anything written on a sign. And they'll see exactly what they expect to see. No more. No less.

the very same day that the American embassy in Jerusalem officially opened), some sixty Palestinians were killed trying to approach the fence. It was a grim day for Israelis, who were saddened by the loss of life. Nonetheless, even among Israel’s left, there were no mass demonstrations, no widespread calls for investigations of the army’s policy or its execution, and no calls for a change in government as a result of what had happened. Israel’s left understood what was at stake. When Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, had said in March, a few months prior, that the protests along the Gaza border were the beginning of the Palestinian return to “all of Palestine,” Israeli leftists believed him. They similarly understood that if Haniyeh was cynically going to send dozens of young Palestinians to trample a border that Israel has always defended with lethal force (while he sat comfortably many kilometers away), he was knowingly sending his own citizens directly into harm’s way. The Israeli left remained saddened and frustrated but, for the most part, quiet.

As we passed through one of the gardens--most of the plants were held away from us by a mesh fence that had a current running through it, I noted--Yssa spoke from behind me, with a tone of controlled fear. “Pary.” I turned back to see a large beetle, almost as long as my palm, crawling on Akos’s cheek. Its wings had bright blue markings, and its antennae were bright, searching. There was another one on his throat, and a third on his arm. “Stay still,” Yssa told him. “Everyone else step back from him.” “Shit,” Pary said. “I take it these insects are poisonous,” Akos said. His Adam’s apple bobbed with a particularly hard swallow. “Very,” Yssa said. “We keep them here because they are very bright when they fly.” “And they avoid anything that is a particularly strong conduit for the current,” Pary added. “Like…people. Most people.” Akos’s eyes closed.

On the subject of social wealth, an attempt has been made to establish a distinction between two kinds, and has even managed to divide the socialist party over this distinction. The school which today is called collectivist, substituting for the collectivism of the old International (which was only anti-authoritarian communism) a sort of doctrinaire collectivism, has tried to establish a distinction between capital which is used for production and wealth which is used to supply the necessities of life. Machinery, factories, raw materials, means of communication, and land on one side, and homes, manufactured goods, clothing, foodstuffs on the other, the former becoming collective property, the latter intended, according to the learned representatives of this school, to remain individual property. There has been an attempt to set up this distinction, but popular good sense has got the better of it; it has found it illusory and impossible to establish. It is vicious in theory and fails in practical life. The workers understand that the house which shelters us, the coal and gas we burn, the fuel consumed by the human machine to sustain life, the clothing necessary for existence, the book we read for instruction, even the enjoyments we get, are all so many component parts of our existence, are all as necessary to successful production and the progressive development of humanity as machines, manufactories, raw materials, and other means of working. The workers are arriving at the conclusion that to maintain private property for this sort of wealth would be to maintain inequality, oppression, exploitation, to paralyze beforehand the results of the partial expropriation. Leaping over the fence set up in their path by theoretical collectivism, they are marching straight for the simplest and most practical form of anti-authoritarian communism.

We arrive at Sandy Ridge, and Chris drives the truck through the gate of the double-fenced perimeter. We meet the caretaker, a new intern named Janet. She’s just received a degree from the University of California, Davis. She carts a wheelbarrow to the truck, and Chris hauls the kennel, wolf and all, into it. They tuck a large five-gallon water jug next to the kennel, and then we set off pulling the male down the main thoroughfare that divides the pens of Sandy Ridge. It has rained heavily this fall, and everything from mushrooms to few-days-old kibbles is coated in mold. Chris pauses for a moment and points into the trees at regularly spaced depressions in the ground. “Did you know that this used to be a cemetery?” he asks. We shake our heads. “This is the highest land around,” he says. “It’s a natural ridge, so it was used for graves. There are a few unmarked ones right there.” He points at the depressions where soil has settled and compacted lower than the surrounding areas. “That’s why we don’t have any wolf pens right there.” High land, in the peninsula, usually means an elevation of a few feet above sea level. The unmarked depressions seem a poignant reminder of how man and wolf share the same spaces in this area, whether knowingly or not.