I was just in Budapest and saw a powerful memorial to both the 1956 Revolution in Hungary which was put down by Soviet troops and about the “Iron Curtain”. The Iron Curtain was a phrase coined by Winston Churchill about the powerfully defended border between Eastern and Western Europe that included the infamous Berlin Wall. A piece of the Berlin Wall was a part that Budapest street memorial along with a evocative thick curtain of chains.
Dan Buttry with the Iron Curtain Memorial in Budapest.
The plaques on the side told about the Iron Curtain and finished with the proud words: “It tormented and humiliated us….And finally we tore it down!” I remember watching the live newscasts of Germans tearing down the Berlin Wall with their own hammers.
Iron Curtain Memorial in Budapest
“And finally we tore it down”
In this political season there is discussion about building another wall–this one between the U.S. and Mexico. Actually, it already exists in large part. I’ve been there in Tijuana and Mexicali. 
In Tijuana you can see through the wall. Families who have been torn apart by immigration policies and enforcement regularly meet at the wall to talk to their loved ones and touch. There are regular ecumenical church services and the Eucharist. People on both sides pray together out of their anguish at being separated by this wall.
Walls can be important in many respects, to create identity and safe space. But they can also become oppressive and brutal in how they create divisions. Will we someday look back on the wall between the U.S. and Mexico with the same disdain as we look back on the Berlin Wall? Will our wall be a tourist site as people celebrate a transformed sense of community and how to handle our borders in more just and humane ways?
Dan Buttry at the wall at the US/Mexico border in Tijuana.
People pray for family members on the other side of the wall in Tijuana
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