The walls around the Republican Convention were not enough. As protesters flooded the streets, police had to form walls of warm human bodies behind shields, movable walls designed to keep the damage confined and the culprits identifiable.

At the other end of the Mississippi, walls built to keep out flood waters were holding, at least for the time being. They were topped by wind driven rains, but the basic idea was working. Everyone knows, of course that those walls are made even more essential by the bitter realization that the slow death of the bayous has made tidal storm surge stronger and more devastating. They put their faith in the walls, not the swamps, and now they have nothing to do but pray that the walls hold.

It’s the same here in Saint Paul.

The swamps are smelly and messy, full of gators and nutria and other horrible things. They are full of life and hold all of the decay and rebirth that completes a full cycle of life. It’s messy and unpleasant, and humans eagerly cast off the foul vision of the swamp. But they are life all the same, and we have put our faith in concrete walls rather than the unpleasantness of life.

Our barriers to the north have been erected because we reject the essential messy bits of life. Peaceful dissent has been replaced by an individualism that has no respect for anyone or anything else. The world is fucked and nasty, so acting out in nasty ways appears only reasonable. People full with all the vitality of youth have the cynicism of ages because their culture is decaying and dying around them. It has rejected life in favor of the culture of walls.

Today the three bridges over the Mississippi were closed down to stop the protests from spreading and renewing, turning the Father of Waters and Bringer of Life into a wall of its own. Water erodes concrete slowly, on its own time, as it brings life to everything it passes by. Today it was more useful as a wall and nothing more.

Down the Mississippi, the problem is too much water. Brilliant minds have spent hours working to channel and contain it in just the right way that it will not disrupt our own little proceedings. The walls will save us, they all say. The water is considered the enemy.

Yet the water is life. The water is the way. Tao ke tao, fei chang tao.

The ways of walls have reached a natural endpoint, one where youth is nearly born with the bitter irony of a horrible experience. The reason is simple; the horror is all around us. It’s the walls that made it that way, and it’s the reliance on walls rather than life that keeps it going. That’s true for both human and natural experiences, which should tell us something. We are, after all, a product of nature ourselves.