Breaking Down the Walls: Editorial

By Debbie Stampfli
When I was nine years old, my room fell apart. Literally.
In one moment on a cold January morning in 1994, my drawers full of books flew out onto the carpet, my glass figurines tumbled from their shelves, and my furniture fell over onto the floor and on top of my bed.
It wasn’t just my room though. The Northridge Earthquake hit our entire neighborhood in a severe way — mainly because my family lived only a few miles from the epicenter. Some chimneys collapsed, and most incredibly, nearly every single one of our neighbor’s fences and walls were knocked down, including ours.
As a result, if you looked outside through our backyard, you could see into nearly every other backyard in the neighborhood. We were suddenly taken away from our comfortable, fenced-in environment, and forced to see into the backyards of people we barely knew. Stranger still, when the boundaries of our backyard opened, we suddenly became host to a number of animals. We began to regularly see squirrels, possums and mice in the days that followed. Our patio table even became home to a pure white dove that we affectionately named “Snowshoe.” After a while, he knew us so well that he would eat Saltine crackers right from our hands.
Although our world was shaken in a terrible way, it was also opened in a strange and beautiful way. After the earthquake, the busy main street we lived on became an unconventional neighborhood. Everyone had to come out of their homes eventually that day, and the most common phrase spoken that morning became, “Are you guys okay?” I wondered if those words would have escaped anyone’s lips if our “worlds” had not been tangibly broken.
In the same sense, I wish we would all become this shaken. It is a terrible thing to go through life in the center of a busy world with fences and walls and barriers keeping us apart from it. We become trapped behind our own fences, unaware of the world that is just next door, full of broken people and even beautiful white doves.
I’ve come to the point where I’ve realized that this is one of the defining marks of our culture. We live for ourselves and rarely see what is going on outside what interests us. When I was driving past a bus stop the other day, I saw an older woman with frazzled dark hair and disappointed eyes, holding her face in her hands. I knew she had grief that this world would categorize as unfixable. And I knew I would never see her again. Granted, it is impossible to take into consideration every pained person we come across. Yet, to ignore them altogether and dissolve into our own self-centered worlds is a tragedy. Some might call this condition apathy, but I think they are being far too kind. It is merely a symptom of our self-consumed culture: egoism, to be sure. Moreover, it demonstrates the complete lack of compassion that has taken us all captive. Instead of being aware and concerned for others, we are exclusively centered on ourselves. And by shutting out the world around us with a frame of indifference, we lose a whole world of unexpected beauty as well. Instead of building taller fences and thicker walls, we should long for earthquakes that take us into worlds we would have nothing to do with otherwise.
In spite of the destructive effect of the earthquake, my family gained a wonderful pet dove and a few new neighbors — things I wouldn’t have noticed in any other circumstance. Likewise, oftentimes when we lock ourselves behind fences instead of letting our walls fall down, we miss the important things, the simplistically beautiful things, and the imperfectly lovely things. But even more so, we need to desire “earthquakes” in order to get out of ourselves and observe those around us. If our worlds have to be shaken in order to transform us into observant and sensitive individuals, then so be it. Better a world of fallen fences than apathetic egomaniacs.