We drove down from San Diego to the border last week. It’s a huge operation. Long lines of automobiles are lined up on both sides, driving south from the United States into Mexico and north from Mexico into the United States. 70,000 people cross that border every day; more than 1,000 walk over the border bridge. Many Mexicans have jobs in the United States and return to their Tijuana homes nightly. It was a Sunday afternoon and we watched a steady stream of men, women and children crossing the border bridge after shopping at the Outlet Malls on the American side.

I was impressed with the simple, ordinary humanness of it all. Families walking toward the bridge, elderly on walkers, babies in strollers, children eating ice cream cones following their parents, adults carrying their purchases. I know our brief visit did not reveal the complexity nor the danger associated with the border. I was simply left with feeling the humanness of it, the families heading for home at the end of the day.

For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated with the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of my nation. As a child I loved looking at pictures of her standing proud and tall. There was a small replica on a living room shelf when I was growing up. My parents told me about it, how it stands in the New York harbor, how it was a gift to us from France, how the illuminated torch in her hand at the very top of her outstretched arm represented liberty lighting the way to our country, how there was a poem by Emma Lazarus engraved in the base… “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free…”, how the first thing millions of immigrants saw of the United States of America was that statue, how service people returning from war often wept when they saw the Statue of Liberty.

The Statue of Liberty always made me proud to be an American, citizen of a nation that opens its arms wide in welcome, a nation that promises hope and opportunity and security and freedom.

The tragedy of the past two years is that the American President is in the process of replacing the Statue of Liberty and its promise with another symbol of America – a wall, a wall to keep people out, “a big, beautiful wall” he calls it and declares that if you don’t have a secure border with an impenetrable wall you don’t have a nation. The replacement of the Statue of Liberty with an ugly wall as a symbol of my nation is depressing.

Of course nations have to have borders. Of course it is necessary to control who comes in and who goes out. But no one except the President and his enablers believes that a wall is the answer. No one.

The lead editorial in the February 13, 2019 Christian Century wisely observed: “A border wall is a cruel symbol, reflecting some of America’s worst instincts. It’s also an effective symbol: it captures starkly the notion that national boundaries must be fiercely protected from outsiders.”

That is beyond sad. But, because of what I saw last week I have a new West Coast symbol to supplement the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast. My new symbol is that bridge reflecting welcome, access to both the United States and to Mexico, a symbol of an important truth that, I would suggest, is both nobler and truer than mean-spirited protectionism, that our common humanity transcends national boundaries, transcends ethnicity and skin color. That bridge suggests something of our most precious belief, that all of us are created in the image of God and are part of a universal human family.

John M. Buchanan