Roads, walls and fences became an important part of the legacy of the poet Robert Frost and are on a path to achieving the same prominence in the legacy of the presidency of Joseph Biden Jr.
Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874, but the death of his father caused his family to move to a farm in Lawrence, Mass. Joseph Biden Jr. was born on Nov. 20, 1942, in Scranton, Penn., and spent his childhood there.
Frost attended Dartmouth and Harvard, where he hoped to become a poet. President Biden studied political science and English at the University of Delaware.
Frost faced the career decision often faced by other liberal arts graduates who aspire to be poets.
Mr. Biden chose to use his liberal arts degree to study law at Syracuse University.
Thus began their legacies of roads, walls and fences.
Roads. Frost wrote about his career decision to become a poet in his poem “The Road Not Taken” that began:
Two roads diverted in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both.
And Frost concluded his poem with:
I should be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood and I
I took the one less traveled,
And that has made all the difference.
President Biden used his law degree to return to Delaware and make several attempts at practicing law, both solo and in conjunction with others, before beginning the “road” of a political career, starting with local offices before serving for 36 years in the U.S. Senate.
President Biden’s legacy intercepted with roads with his appointing Pete Buttigieg to be in charge of them as the secretary of transportation. Upon assuming that office, Pete, before taking maternity leave to adopt a baby, accused a primary part of his new responsibilities, the roads in the U.S., as being “systemic racists” without any explanation of how inanimate objects can be “racists.”
This was no surprise to anyone who knew Pete since previously he had said the “U.S. healthcare system is systemic racist,” as he previously had said about the U.S. systems of housing, school and uniforms. (I assume he meant the military although there are many professions that wear uniforms, such as police, firefighters and nurses although he may have included nurses in his allegations about the healthcare system).
Mr. Buttigieg has only visited one port, despite the backup at the ports, which is related to the insufficient number of trucks carrying goods on the roads. Mr. Buttigieg’s failures to correct the supply chain problems at ports, when combined with the lack of activity on the part of Mr. Biden’s Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm to keep the price of gasoline down, has led to almost crippling inflation.
Walls. Frost’s legacy includes the poem “Mending Wall” (1914), which begins, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” and includes the lines
… to whom I was like to give offense
Something there that doesn’t love a wall
That wants it down…
President Biden’s legacy of walls includes his stopping construction of the Trump wall, which crossed the southern border. Neither he nor Vice President Kamala Harris has visited that border, where the Mexican drug cartels are making hundreds of millions of dollars a week from drugs and tolls charged to the 8,000 illegal immigrants crossing the border each day.
Those who want a wall include taxpaying U,S, citizens, particularly those living close to the border.
President Biden appointed Vice President Harris to reduce the number of border crossers by “addressing the root causes” of the migration. That meant distributing hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars to Guatemala and Mexico in her brief “whistle stops” of several hours in each country without any followup in the more than a year since.
President Biden chose not to defend the walls at the Bagram airfield in Afghanistan, which established his legacy internationally.
Frost wrote about mending a wall with:
The gaps I meant, No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending time we find them there.”
And on a day we meet to walk the line, and set the wall between us once again.
. Biden’s actions were “anti-mending”Mr in that his executive order, which required allowing the tens of millions of dollars of steel already purchased for the wall to turn to rust.
Fences. Frost’s legacy includes his line “Good fences make good neighbors.”
President Biden does agree with building fences to protect himself.
He spent $628,000 of taxpayers’ money to build a fence around his Rehoboth beach house to supplement the Secret Service agents guarding the property. In context, this is a relatively small amount compared to the $20,000 a month rent the Secret Service spends for a Malibu beach house close enough to Hunter Biden to ensure his safety.
Legacies. Roads, walls and fences are already solidified in the legacy of Robert Frost.
How will they impact the legacy of Joseph Biden Jr.?
Brent E. Zepke is an attorney, arbitrator and author who lives in Santa Barbara. Formerly he taught at six universities and numerous professional conferences. He is the author of six books: “One Heart-Two Lives,” “Legal Guide to Human Resources,” “Business Statistics,” “Labor Law,” “Products and the Consumer” and “Law for Non-Lawyers.”
