Bridges or Fences

The international do-gooder crowd, you know the Peace Corps-type, always pontificate about building bridges not fences, but when your neighbors are as rotten as many in the Middle East and South Asia, give me the fence and a strong one any day. The cultural exchange will solve everything crowd did not envision the sort of nihilist that has arisen and proliferated the Arab world, Pakistan, and Afghanistan- the sort of monster that would hang the eight year old son of a police chief or strap a bomb vest to a preteen girl, or blow up a girls' school, or attack females who have the temerity to want to learn to read with poison gas. There can be no outreach toward those who enforce ignorance and attack education. There is little reason that a British Cultural Centre is in Kabul as such an enterprise will never elevate the locals and only serve as a rallying point to attack as happened yesterday. In an ideal world, the hands across the water would bring diverse peoples together and these bridges would work but today, in the real world, the decent need impregnable walls- the stronger the fence the better.