There’s no doubt: Walls need to stay down – Bonner County Daily Bee

March 21, 2017 at 5:00 am |

As I recall recent history the reminder of the wall of shame that was the Berlin Wall comes to mind, especially for the focal point it provided President Ronald Reagan in calling out for its removal. As we embark upon a fiscally impractical southern border the historical record looms large as to the efficacy of such great walls. Do we not read and learn from history, or is such a border wall really a device to rhetorically allay fears that are stoked by the nattering nabobs of negativism that tell us our country is crumbling? That last quotation was borrowed from Spiro Agnew as an opening salvo directed at the news media. It is relevant today but in a vice versa other way around use for the politics of fear that is spouted about our countrys demise.

Look around and observe the number of incredible entrepreneurs everywhere across the United States who did not seem to realize that we were losing or broken by a great recession. This is the country where people come who have a dream and a vision. In an ever changing market place, this is where you can come and take the risk, and possibly lose yet start again at your beginnings. It is said that nothing great exists that did not first start as a failure.

Look at the history of Sandpoint and Bonner County over the last 40 years and see the remarkable reinvention of an area that moved through a resource-based industry (now revamped with technology), through a tourist-based economy, to an amalgam of technology-based and aerospace industries. We have had the luxury of our Coldwater Creek infusion of jobs and smart people as well as the Thorne Labs and Lead-Lok focus on biomedical innovation. We have been blessed with the long lasting and stable foundation provided by the Hawkins family and quality Litehouse food products. We have had the visionary benefit of the Ambrosianis providing products reknown for quality and getting it right. We have enjoyed any number of restaurants and artists who have come to ply their trade in this beautiful, yet harsh, business environment. The point is that we have all been allowed to take the risk and constantly reinvent where needed. We did not do this by keeping people out.

When we withdraw into our closed shells and put up walls to keep others out we actually diminish ourselves by hemming in that spark of life and creativity that each possesses. We are served well by that constant interaction and mixing of ideas and perspectives. Lets refuse to be afraid of everything and the pawns that we become in the hands of the fearmongers. This is a great nation that is reinvigorated constantly by our immigrant genealogy, and we have only to look at our own town to realize that most of us here were immigrants to Sandpoint. We are now all part of that reinvigorated, and changing, core. As history demonstrates, walls invite blasting; climbing and scaling; tunneling; pole vaulting; drone invasions; or, simply going around.

Lets keep the walls down.

BARNEY BALLARD

Sandpoint

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There's no doubt: Walls need to stay down - Bonner County Daily Bee