Tom Henihan
The partial shutdown of the U.S. Government due to Donald Trump insistence on receiving over 3.5 billion dollars to build a wall along the U.S. – Mexico border provides in graphic terms the damage Trump is willing to inflict on Americans in order to get his own way.
Trump’s proposed wall is rightly termed by many as Medieval and his repeated claim that there is a national crisis on the U.S. southern border is clearly a manufactured crisis.
While there is no crisis on America’s southern border, Trump’s intransigence on having the wall built is financially devastating to over 800.000 U.S. Government workers.
This is especially callus as building the wall is for no better reason than to deliver on a key campaign promise and avoid humiliation in front of his base.
The repercussions of the shutdown for U.S. government employees are serious: being unable to pay the rent or mortgage, car payments and struggling to feed their families.
However, Trump is unwilling or incapable of identifying with the struggles of ordinary Americans; he is capable only of seeing matters from his own perspective and acting only to further his own dubious and selfish objectives.
In response to the criticism that his idea of building a wall is Medieval, Trump compares it to the wheel, which is also ancient but still essential in today’s world.
As with almost everything Trump says, this over simplistic analogy comparing a wall to the wheel is absurd.
A great many things in our contemporary world have survived relatively unaltered through millennium, things we don’t consider archaic but contemporary and useful.
Walls are not medieval: but proposing to build one along a 3,145-kilometer border to stall an imaginary enemy certainly belongs to the Dark Ages.
It is laughable to see the President of the world’s greatest military and economic power insist that his country adapt his racist, siege mentality and cower behind a wall, because he says that some Latin American boogeyman is coming to destroy the U.S.
History has a legion of walls: the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall, and the Berlin Wall, formidable undertakings in their time that now signify nothing except, from a contemporary perspective, the folly of former emperors and kings.
The world changes and walls crumble showing us that decency ard reason must eventually prevail as people finally go over, under or through these walls designed to separate humanity on the grounds of race, creed and ideology.
In 1991, the world cheered as it watched the people bring down the Berlin Wall.
Now, 28 years later another dividing wall is being proposed.
No American should accept hiding behind a wall because they are scared of men, women and children whose only crime is poverty and desperation, and whose only aspiration is not to invade but to contribute and belong.