Another monument to inhumanity

Another monument to inhumanity

By Nicole Nutting

As a resident of San Diego, California, I have the dubious pleasure of living mere miles from the site where contractors are finishing construction on four prototype designs for the proposed Mexican Border Wall. Any day now President Trump will show up to admire them, if he can put down his golf clubs.

The whole concept of a new wall is just absurd. For one thing, we already have a wall! Border town residents are well aware that drugs and immigrants regularly go over, under, and around it. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way”, and to expect any wall alone to stop the flow is simply naive. At best, a new wall would merely provide an expensive false sense of security. The construction cost for this project is unknown, but those billions of dollars could be put to more efficient use.

With neither practical nor fiscal logic behind this plan, what is its impetus? It springs from the selfish mind of a man who has lived his sheltered life in a gilt-trimmed Manhattan penthouse. His vision of a Norman Rockwell America doesn’t include brown people, and his White Nationalist base is in lock step.

To keep out all those “rapists” and “bad hombres”, as well as hard-working people hoping for a better quality of life, it’s going to require other solutions. This president promised more employment opportunities, so why not increase the labor force at the Border Patrol and put more boots on the ground? If we have money to burn, why not invest in a fleet of drones to help monitor the border? Both of those ideas would yield a better return on the investment.

  If this proposed wall actually does get built, we should remember one thing: it is less an architectural structure than it is a crutch to prop up hateful souls. Even the most beautiful new border wall would forever be an external symbol of an internal human deficit. The taller the wall, the smaller the heart. Perversely, its proponents STILL wouldn’t feel secure.