Mending Wall

Growing up in the country just outside of a small South Dakota town, the idea of privacy fences are a little bazaar to me.  I am used to fences that keep the cattle out of my back yard (hopefully anyway) or to keep my dogs from running into town all the time.  It is quite appalling to me that someone would build a fence simply for privacy from the neighbors.  I can kind of see people’s point in building one in a city where your neighbor’s house is less than two feet away but in Robert Frost’s poem, Mending Wall, the two men were farmers.  When I finished reading this poem, I thought it was sad that they thought good fences made good neighbors because from my experience the best neighbors are the ones who don’t care if you’re in their yard and maybe don’t even know where the property line is. 

It makes me sad to think that my generations and the generations to come are just going to make this worse.  I loved growing up with the freedom of running around through fields and pastures not knowing who owned what parts.  It’s crazy to think that Frost wrote this in 1914 when I feel that his poem has so much significance in what is happening in our world today.  People have become so obsessed with privacy that it is starting to become ridiculous.  Going into nursing, I have had to learn a lot about HIPPA and all the privacy policies it includes.  It often scares me that I will say the wrong thing to the wrong person and accidently step out of my bounds of what I’m allowed to say.  If you ask me, our right to privacy has gone a little too far.