Build the Wall! Exclude them All!

It's taking me awhile.  But I think I'm finally getting it.

Yes, it's hard for me to get in the heads of Trump wall supporters, and figure out what it is they're really thinking.

Do they really want a 30-foot border wall from one end of the border of Mexico to the other?  From the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico?  Should it be barbed at the top?  Should it be electrified?  Should it descend 70 ft into the ground to prevent tunneling?  Should dragon-style drones swarm from it to shoot down planes or destroy boats?

How seriously do they take this, and what is it they are hoping to achieve?

Why do arguments about its real cost, like the meme above, make no impression on them?

What is really motivating them?

Why not build a super wall along the Canadian border?  It has just as much crime and the potential for terrorist walk-ins as the Mexican border?

What is it when crime is down, particularly crime related to illegal and first-generation immigrants, when illegal immigration is slowing and we are moving towards more people emigrating than immigrating, when unemployment is at record lows, why is this "build the wall" thing such a priority for some people?

It's taken me a while, but I think I got it now.

It's not about a literal wall.  That's why it doesn't bother them when Trump keeps shifting his definition of what it is.

It's not a real wall.

It's a symbolic wall.

Build the Wall

is about racial hatred and fear.

It's about defending the dominant white culture

against the incursion of people of color,

people whom they think hold different values than they do.

What many of us think of as a beautiful thing, the true diversity of a rich and varied society, they think of as the end of civilization.

E Puribis Unum.  Out of many, one.

That was the unofficial motto of the United States for decades.

Then it became In God We Trust, a reaction to Communism in the 1950s, as we started to meander away from the separation of church and state.

And now?  A determined political minority of us want it to be...

Build the Wall

Exclude them All

This country has made terrible mistakes.  Slavery, Jim Crow, the slaughter of indigenous people.  

But I have always believed that the arc of the history of this country has bent towards social justice.

Now that arc is under threat of being whipped back to something horrible.  And it breaks my heart.

Build the wall,  Take down the Statue of Liberty.  Turn us into a nation of inbred ignorant rubes, being conned out of decent paying jobs, healthcare, affordable schooling, the dream of humanity loving and united, all to serve the needs of a blind and hateful white nationalism, while the rich and powerful laugh and clink their glasses on how easy it is to distract us and focus our rage on each other.

The physical wall will not be built.  It most likely was never really in play.

It is the symbolic wall I am worried about.

The wall that keeps so many of us trapped in fear and hate.

That wall will be much harder to tear down.