On Walls...

Figure it out…

…Try as we may, it seems that the biggest superpower in the world can build walls in foreign places that are bloodied by bombs going off and Civil Wars exploding on all sides but we can’t seem to get it together enough to build a wall in our own backyard to keep out drugs and illegal immigrants. Seems like a no brainer! So, why the problem?

Well, if you listen to the pundits on both sides, there seems to be all kinds of problems.

Of course, if we build the wall, who will pick our crops, watch our kids, wash the dishes, mow the lawns, put up the frames, pluck the chickens, process the meat and do all of the other distasteful jobs for an unsatisfactory wage?

Then there are other issues.

What kind of wall shall we build? Apparently, there are all types.
How tall should it be? How thick? What should it be constructed of?....you see, it’s already getting mind-boggling and we haven’t even started.

Off course, not everyone knows how to build a wall.

The only one’s immediately available are the ones we don’t want to let in.

What we may have to do is resort t trickery. If we decide to go forward, we’ll have to import Mexicans to build the wall and then on some pretense tell them to go around and check the front and then lock the door.

Admittedly, that would be pretty sneaky but sometimes you do what you have to do.
At this point, considering Americans inability to do most things, we could not probably get beyond drawing a picture of a wall, making appropriate music for a wall, and doing other things wall related—except that is building a wall.

Wall building, itself, is really a craft practiced in the ancient world.
And mostly it was conceived of to kill two birds with one stone. i.e. keep the bad guys out and keep your army out of trouble. You see, soldiers when they aren’t working, they have a tendency to get drunk. Clever those Romans.

We don’t really have enough troops on the border to build a wall even if they knew how. And if they did, the Unions I’m sure wouldn’t allow it. So before we started building, we would be on strike.

It’s not like we haven’t tried.

But you know, that big bad budget wolf keeps threatening to blow it all down. So, without much help, we’ve only been able to build 200 miles out of what was supposed to be a wall 700 miles long.

In the meantime, the Mexicans keep pouring over the border adding to our 12 to 20 million illegal immigrants. This has caused a good deal of embarrassment to a government that has built a house of cards that apparently doles out security very selectively if the truth be known.

The trick is for the terrorists to understand the rules.

But it doesn’t seem to work like that. The bad guys won’t cooperate.

Of course, there is no big rush to arrest these guys even if we could find them. And then what we would do with them?

If we wanted to ship them out, we would need more than 200,000 buses.

And what about food?

. Can you imagine going to MacDonalds and asking for maybe 5 million chicken sandwiches and 8 million hamburgers with another 4 million cheeseburgers.
And how would we deliver nearly fifteen million cokes?

You see, the logistics are horrific.

And what about the garbage. We’d have to get the Mexicans off the bus to move their waste to land fills before we could go forward with our plan

And can you imagine what it would do to our gas prices to have another 200,000 buses filling up at gas stations all over the country, or the monumental traffic jobs. Not a pretty picture.

We have a tentative solution…at least for the Walls part of the bill.

But we’re going to have to go back into history to use it.

Remember Hadrian’s wall?. This wall which was hundreds of miles long was very sophisticated for its day. It had brickwork on both sides and the insides were filled in with rocks and scrap but it has stood up sixteen hundred years…and that seems to meet the specs.

Who do we get to build it?

The Romans, of course. These guys are the best builders of walls and roads in the world.
And they don’t need anything but a piece of string and a pencil. Also, they use what’s around. Remember, these are the guys who invented concrete. Who built roads all over Asia and Europe so the Legions could stand tall and wave their standards.

Of course, all we need is the Wall.

The trouble is to do that we will have to use diplomacy.

And we have the Catch 22 of diplomacy in the US today.

The rule goes like this If we need to talk to them, we don’t; And if we don’t need to talk to them, it’s okay to talk to them.

So you see, it will take some time to navigate this mess so that we can build our wall to keep out the Mexicans who pick our crops and do all the nasty work we don’t want to do.

If you’re having a little trouble following this, don’t feel alone.

It’s called American policy.

And it’s guaranteed to break down each and every time….


Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon