Friday, April 14, 2000
What makes people want a fence?
BY Mike Pulfer
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Some of the fences that outline our lots are there to keep the dogs at home. Some are for skinny-dipping in the backyard pool.
Some are there because somebody wanted to draw a line. A big fat solid one nobody would be tempted to cross.
“Society has a real problem with limits and boundaries,” says Ralph Quinn, Walnut Hills psychologist. And fences could be symbols of that problem.
“In a time when banks and everything — the Internet, television cameras, the press — are invading our privacy,” people get concerned about “violations of what are considered normal boundaries,” he says.
Building a fence is one way to “let other people know where you begin and they end.”
For tall, solid-wall fences that block the view from outside, there's “the good old conspiracy theory,” he said, among people who believe, “you better take care of yourself because somebody — some Big Brother — is watching.
“There's a lot of pure paranoia out there.”
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