His Walls Don’t Go All The Way To The Top

Contractors Build Wall “Samples” For Trump To View

“Build The Wall!”

“Build the Wall!” became a poplar chant of the 2016 campaign, along with, ‘Lock Her Up’. While both have all the real world meaning of ‘Gabba Gabba Hey!’, only the former has actually been carried over as presidential policy, having some very interesting effects on cross-border relations both to the south and the north. Even so, the rhetoric about a border wall has a special form of crazy and stupid related to it, greater than nearly anything else Trump has ever said, except perhaps describing “Falling in love” with North Korean dictator, Kim Jung Un.

Berliners Celebrate the End To The Berlin Wall

Very much aside from the assertion that the Mexican government is going to be footing the bill for a wall meant to keep its citizens from cross-border travel, the other challenges are cost and topography, while daunting, are far from insurmountable. Trump’s wall if it extended the entire southern border would crawl across the deserts of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas for a total of 1,957 miles. To put that in perspective, the Berlin Wall is 87 miles long, 11 feet high and three feet thick.

Berlin Wall

Building a similar wall between the U.S. and Mexico, while extremely expensive, and needing to be built up mountains and over rivers, is technically possible. Homeland Security estimates the cost at $17 million dollars per mile. Gulp. Do we really have the national will or financial wear-with-all to build such an absurdity, when we are facing a pending infrastructure collapse, a faltering health care system where care is denied to millions of citizens, as well as a staggering and ballooning foreign debt? Just doing a reality check, folks.

Walls Don’t Stop The Determined

Despite its gargantuan size and allegedly impenetrable status, it has been estimated that some 5,000 people made it safely to West Germany between the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and its later demolition in 1989 at the hands of incensed East & West Germans (you can only push people so far before they show up with sledge-hammers and pitch forks).

The Great Wall Didn’t Stop The Final Invasion

The Great Wall of China

Beside the economy busting cost of such a project; the major flaw that Trump and all the other wall promoters overlook, walls even as impressive as the Great Wall of China, don’t actually work. Using the Chinese as an example, that 13,171 mile long Great Wall was a somewhat useful deterrent against raids, at several points throughout its history, but the wall, great or not, failed to stop the determined. Most notably when in 1644 the Manchu Qing marched through the gates of Shanhai Pass and replaced the greatest wall builders in history.

Belfast’s Peace Walls Stopped None Of The Violence

Peace Walls Be Damned

Northern Ireland’s so-called ‘Peace Walls’ physically separating the Catholic dominated West side of Belfast from the Protestant dominated East also have not been living up to expectations. Between the construction of the walls in 1969 and the, tentative, cease-fire brought about by the Good Friday Agreement in 1999 an estimated 2,200 civilians died as a result of sectarian violence in Belfast alone. This may not seem like much compared to American numbers but keep in mind that Northern Ireland is part of Great Britain, which has an average annual murder rate of 1 in 100,000, not including law enforcement.

Over, Under, Or, Around

The walls that already exist around Israel do not seem to be doing any better. Various militia and terrorist groups in the surrounding Arab territories, not exactly thrilled with the idea of a thriving, growing Jewish homeland in their midst and not quite vanquished in the Six Day War, still manage to get in and detonate bombs and lob missiles over the barriers from the surrounding hills.

Walls Go Galactic    

Building A Wall Around Mars Will Be Easy!

So, if Trump and his administration are determined to spend interminable amounts of money and effort, perhaps they really ought to focus on building a ‘Space Force’ to defend America against the threat of Alien invasion. While even more expensive and technically taxing than a border wall with Mexico, or indeed Canada, would be, a battalion of Space Soldiers patrolling the American section of space, while they would be less tangible, I suspect they would be considerably more effective.

 

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