The wall: Separating democracy from voters

By Robert C. Koehler

The mainstream media imposes some serious certainties on the 2020 presidential election that drive me into a furious despair, e.g.:

Even though Bernie Sanders, winner of the first two Democratic primaries, is now leading in the national polls, he “can’t and won’t” be the party’s nominee “because in coming weeks,” writes Liz Peek in The Hill, “Democrats will make sure that Socialist Bernie does not get the nomination. More will realize that he will lead the party to a calamitous loss, and they will look for an alternative. Overwhelmed by ads, underwhelmed by others in the race, they will come to realize that Mike Bloomberg is the best they’ve got.”

Hey progressives, America is not a socialist country! Get it?

As this certainty imposes itself on the election coverage, in both obvious and subtle ways, I find myself juxtaposing it with another emerging tidbit of news:

“Parts of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument — the parts with indigenous burial grounds and other rare, historically important areas — are being bulldozed and blown up to make way for the border wall that Mexico is supposedly going to pay for.”

The Trump border wall proceeds, slicing through, and destroying, a complex ecological wonder that also happens to be indigenous sacred ground. The wall, writes evolutionary biologist Kelsey Yule, is turning the landscape into an ecological dystopia.