Of Walls and Hearts
Unless it’s about blind party loyalty, which is plausible, I can’t understand the level of support for Trump’s border wall. The majority of immigrants do not simply walk across the border. The republican border wall isn’t about immigration at all. They’re simply projecting their walled off heart onto the country at large. The two go hand in hand, the border wall and a closed mind. How often do you run into someone full of compassion that wants to build the wall?
The wall isn’t about Jesus. Jesus took care of the sick and the poor, which is something else many supporters of the border wall don’t want to do. Much like you can’t talk to many people about Jesus, being a mythological figure and all, you can’t talk to many people about the wall. They’re closed off: they won’t listen. They may hear your words but it is unlikely they won’t sink in.
The wall was advertised as someone else’s problem from the start. Mexico was going to pay for it. Now, we’re already cutting programs to try to free funding for something that will be a waste of resources from the moment of conception. To the closed-minded, this sounded great. Someone else gets to put in the effort into erecting the barrier. To keep one’s heart walled off, it takes effort. You have to keep pushing people away, have to keep rejecting reality and substituting your own.
By all estimates, the wall will be a bigger cost and a larger project than was promised. Those of us who thought it was a stupid idea simply thought it was a stupider idea. Those that want the wall have either decided to do it anyway, or at worse rejected those plans as defeatist. They’re trying to maintain their own wall. They can’t have their victory snatched from them. If so, they’ll find someone to shift the blame to. It is never their fault from safely behind the walls of their heart.
The USA has long been a ‘melting pot’ of the world. We’ve taken music from Africa and food from Asia. We’ve taken Middle Eastern religion and European culture. We continuously take all this input from everywhere and make new things. There isn’t a set of things that make us definitively American. We have a broad range of features, cultures, climates, words, cuisine, etc. In some ways, we adapt very quickly.
Then you have the people who have walled off their heart. They have a different vision of America. One that doesn’t match who we are at all. They want to push people out, turn us into something we’re not. They want to make us more intolerant than we are. They want to take our diversity away. To quote Lewis Carroll “To remove our muchness.”
I like our muchness, and I like being open. I understand that there is a degree of vulnerability not having walls up. I also understand that not keeping people out also means that I get to let people in: the artists and artisans, the lovers and dreamers, the fiddlers and doers, the hungry for food and the hungry for life – everyone.
No, the wall is a terrible idea and it will be a dark stain on our already troubled history, just as someone trying to keep their heart walled off is something they often come to regret later on in life.