Walls, Gaps, and Trenches

Is there a difference between being right and being dead right?

Is it possible to kill people with truth?

This is a  song about the cost of being right

Link to the song: Walls, Gaps, and Trenches

“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 offense.”

— Robert Frost, Mending Wall

I’ve loved Robert Frost’s Mending Wall since high school.

Two neighbors meet yearly to stack fallen rocks back onto a wall between them. Frost hints (with a wink and a nudge) that the wall may not be necessary at all—there are no cows. No threat. And yet they rebuild it anyway. One neighbor insists on the old proverb, “Good fences make good neighbors,” while Frost wonders aloud, Why? What are we really protecting?

That tension has lived with me for decades.

And lately, in the world we inhabit—especially online—I feel the weight of those stones pressing heavier every year.

X threads, comment sections, and political tribalism have turned into trenches.
We are fluent in argument. We are losing fluency in listening.

Both sides shout.
Both sides blame.
Both are absolutely certain the problem is the other trench.

We worry about winning debates- what about winning people?

It’s about the relational casualties we ignore along the way.

We built these walls so high, brick by stubborn brick
You stand your ground, and I stand mine, we never seem to click

At some point, the disagreement stops being about ideas and starts being about identity.

And once I believe you are the problem, not the point you’re making—
the wall becomes permanent.

We see the same horizon, but it looks so different here
You're calling out your logic, and I just cover my ears

If Frost questioned the need for a physical wall, the song questions our emotional ones.

Frost writes:

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…”

Something in us yearns for connection.

But something else—fear, pride, the addiction to certainty—keeps building.

In the song, those walls turn into trenches:

Rivals in our trenches, staring across the line
We’re just two stubborn hearts, convinced that we're both right

Isn’t that social media now?

Everyone dug in.
No one moving.
No bridge being built.

We think the wall is protecting us.
Mostly it traps us.

One verse turns toward a painful reality:

You build your truth in stone, I stack mine up in clay
We tend to what divides us, and let the roots decay

We have confused certainty with maturity.

We have confused winning with wisdom.

We have forgotten that relationships have deeper roots than arguments.

If Frost’s neighbor keeps rebuilding the wall because that’s the way it’s always been done, we sometimes defend our position simply because we don’t want to lose.

And we do lose—just not the way we think.

No trust, no truth, no healing, just distance and despair
We're mending walls between us, and neither of us cares

In Frost’s poem, the narrator points out that the wall might not make sense.

The neighbor refuses to question the proverb.

I feel that same dilemma when I write, post, or scroll.

I can spend hours crafting arguments.
Rarely do I spend the same energy crafting peace.

So the song ends with the question we avoid:

If I just reach across the line, could we somehow build a bridge?

That one line is the battle.

Not the argument.
Not the wall.
The reaching.

When Frost says…

“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out.”

…he invites us to pause.

To ask:

• What am I protecting?

• Or who am I shutting out?

• And what am I afraid will happen if my wall comes down?

The song ends with a realization that feels more confession than declaration:

We built these walls so high, thinking they’d protect
But all we've done is trap ourselves...

Walls don’t just keep others out.
They keep us lonely.

I pray for a return to civil discourse.
I pray for neighbors to speak with respect, not suspicion.
I pray for curiosity to replace certainty when certainty becomes a hammer.

And I pray for courage.

Not to win arguments—
but to love people.

After all…

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”