• More and more today we find ourselves holding up walls to our minds. In today’s world, feelings are taboo, and anyone expressing them is either dangerous or a sissy. We hold things in, and all of our grudges and our injustices against us, to use a term expressed by the famous rock album, are bricks in the wall. And bit by bit, we find, or I find, that our walls grow so large and thick, it’s impossible to see past the mass of our past hurts. These barriers we put up to protect us, when we were insulted and belittled and demeaned, when we just locked up our consciousness in our own little bubble, are holding us in. It’s impossible to let anyone else inside.
    I find it shocking that when I was younger, I told myself that everything my dad said, everything I ever had to endure, it hurt now, but it was like a forge. I came out steeled for the next onslaught. I thought this was a good thing at the time.
    But now, looking back, I shouldn’t have embraced it. It’s lonely inside the wall, with nobody inside. And through our protections, there are those people we let inside before the walls became overwhelming, and every time there’s a heated remark against you from them, the bullet goes straight through your heart. And the wall shrinks. Security works two ways, and there are no telephones high enough to go through the wall of protection turned jailer.
    In today’s world, people are growing more detached from themselves and others. Though we are closer with the Internet and communications technology, its impersonal anonymity gives us a jaded suspicion that adds to our loneliness. More and more I find that things seem to register less to people. Our knowledge has overtaken our empathy. A rape? A murder? Oh, they happen such and such an amount in such and such a time. It’s okay, you’re not alone in your pain. But they are. We are increasingly alone. We speak offhandedly of doing things that the mere mention fifty years ago would have you slapped across the face by a stranger on the street.
    So, I guess what I’m trying to say here is, how much further can this go? Can we really go through life, our hearts, minds, and souls shut to others? Will we walk past, ten or twenty years from now, as a teenage girl is molested, indifferent? Will we accept the wall as reality? Or will we stand up and say “enough is enough?” To again quote the Pink Floyd album The Wall, we need to look at one another and say “Hello? Is there anybody in there?”