Gatekeeping gatekeeping

I receive suggestions all the time about gates from people who don’t even have gates. Yet they’re always there to make a recommendation. It’s a troubling development, to be sure. Because you can’t have just anyone building a gate. To the laykeeper, a gate is a hinged component of any otherwise impenetrable fence. It allows for free and easy access to those with the key, the combination, or the sheer force of will to enter. 

The problem with amateur gatekeepers is their collective ignorance of gatekeeping. Knowing moats were used in Medieval England because your childhood Lego set included one is quite different from having dug actual trenches for a wet and wild installation.  

Before you build a gate, you need to first understand the history of gates. I’m sorry to point fingers, but these are the same people who spout off about “barb wire.” When Barb Wire is a middle-aged woman with a beehive hairdo handing out trays of delicious jello snacks to a group of ravenous and hyperactive six year olds. Barbed wire, on the other hand, is what created the modern cattle industry as we know it. Ultimately, it’s about control, gatekeeping that is. But did it ever to occur to these Johnny-gate-latelys that perhaps the bovines wanted to keep us out, too? 

Only a person with an uncommon approach to egress can truly appreciate the necessity and efficacy of gates. But what’s a gate if it isn’t kept up? I'll tell you. It falls into disrepair, develops rust, and eventually comes off the hinges. While it’s not a pretty sight, I’ve had the grave misfortune of witnessing my fair share of shameful gates. 

A gate isn’t only to keep people out, it’s to keep people in, too. It’s why the invisible fence, for all its press and canine acolytes, never caught on. We want to see our wares. Hadrian’s Wall wasn’t solely a wall, it had gates, lots of them. Same goes for the Great Wall of China as well as those outlining the yards of several of my more affluent neighbors. 

Gatekeeping is not for amateurs. It’s for experts. Those people who have devoted their lives to the reverance and preservation of short, rather ineffectual boundaries. Climbing over a gate is considered by many to be a rite of passage, or at least the easiest way to rip a new pair of blue jeans. 

So yeah, go to Home Depot, buy some supplies and build a shoddy, tawdry, soon-to-be rickety gate. It won't change who you are or what you're here to do. 

 

Leave gatekeeping to the gatekeepers.