On walls and bridges

There is a quote I saw once that I absolutely love: "People have built too many walls and not enough bridges". My mother taught me that the simplest bridge is a feat of engineering, and the longest ones should be regarded with far more reverence than any temple. On the other hand, walls are a very straightforward affair, any idiot can build one.

The same happens metaphorically speaking: any idiot can create division, admiration should be reserved for those that build bridges between different groups of people. This week has been all about watching walls in a vain hope to see them somehow morph into bridges. 

Monday started with the official presentation of the One Planet Living Plan, that turned up to be a pretty list of recommendations on an incredibly wide range of issues, lacking figures, timescales, and the sort of order that one tends to assume in something that calls itself a plan. Compared with the peak oil report I write a year and a half ago, my report could stand its own quite well. It made a better attempt at structure and it included some decent predictions on the likelihood of the economy going south, while the so-called plan didn't even contain a mention of the present credit crunch. Out of date already on the day of its first presentation. But, of course, the so-called plan had been written by a proper consultancy company, while my report was written by poor little me. In the minds of the Council, there is an immensely tall wall between consultancy companies and intelligent individuals. Do they believe consultancy work is undertaken by dozens of alien creatures, rather than one or two intelligent persons? No, they just know that consultants are part of their tribe, but I'm not. That's reason enough for a wall.

Immediately after that meeting, a group of four of us went straight into the next one, the one about decision-making I had been dreading the whole week before. My dread proved entirely justified the minute we walked through the door. The meeting was facilitated by this guy that behaved like he honestly believed he had drank from the deepest wells of wisdom and the rest of us existed to be endlessly patronized. The first thing he did was demand from us to agree to something quite silly, "To take care of our own welfare and serve the welfare of the rest of the people in this room", if I remember correctly. Unfortunately, there were two mathematicians among the four newcomers. One was me, but I manage to be pretty normal most of the time, in spite of my maths degree. The other was a more typical representative of the strange breed of mathematicians, which is to say, hiperlogical to the point of moderate autism. He started to argue things like those two statements could be conceivable incompatible, and he wouldn't agree to anything if he didn't understand the implications of it. The second point was actually a pretty normal reaction to a demand to agree to something quite baffling. How would the facilitator react to a demand to agree that "The whole is greater than the part and things that coincide with each other equal each other", I wonder? Anyway, the whole thing ended with the facilitator asking the poor mathematician to leave the room, which led to another member of our party to leave as well, and me hanging in the middle of the room for a whole minute, undecided. I finally stayed because somebody had to tell the guy he's an idiot. Once again, it's so much easier to build walls between tribes than making the smallest effort to understand.

On Sunday I visited my ex in prison, and that was all about walls again, as you'd expect. But these particular walls did morph into a bridge, in the most unexpected way. On the way back, while waiting for the bus, I started chatting with another woman that was also visiting somebody. During the bus trip, the walls of the prison became a bond between us, like a shared secret.

Today I spent the day watching court cases, waiting for one of them to be the one of my ex, but somehow I missed it. I did see, though, the whole lot of cases of the protesters against the local arms factory. Apparently they broke in and destroyed as much equipment as they could get their hands on. The public gallery was full of hippies watching the procedures. My sympathies went to the judge. The wall between the two sides was almost visible, and clearly topped with the nastiest kind of barbed wire. And you could see in the face of the judge he could clearly see both points of view: Yes, the protesters say they are trying to stop the greater crime of weapons being made to kill children in Gaza, and I could glimpse some sympathy for that. But the business sees itself as a perfectly legitimate business. And in any case, the judge wasn't there to decide who was right, but just to decide who could be let out on bail and who couldn't. And in a way, the decision to grant bail or not is more difficult than the definitive trial: I don't think the protesters will have much chance at the trial, but deciding exactly how likely someone is to breach bail, measure it against the harm you could be doing to them by keeping them imprisoned, and trying to figure which option is most likely to make them pursue non-destructive strategies from now on... difficult, that one. And nobody is going to appreciate the balancing efforts of the magistrate, I suspect.

Then, today was also the meeting of the Transport Group, all about keeping things connected. It was a good counterpoint to the rest of the walls in the week.