Of course the wall I am referring to is President Trump’s ill-conceived border wall between the United States and Mexico. It is ill conceived in terms of its purpose, its economics, and its blindingly obvious racist implications.
The efficacy of a border wall is highly dubious. Illicit market driven material does not come across in deep isolated area of the desert carried by dirty criminal migrant with comically over-sized calves as describe with over racist imagery by GOP Representative Steve King of Iowa, it crosses in trucks and cars and other cargo carrying vehicles through regular ports of entry. For decades now, with sporadic variations, the number of people crossing the border illegally to find work has been decreasing and the recent increases have been from family units appearing at those ports of entry making asylum claims, something a border wall will have no effect on.
President Trump’s motivations for the border wall appear to be blatantly racist, something he has hardly hidden since the start of his campaign, and driven by fear of his base turning against him. His often repeated ‘evidence’ of the need for his wall cherry pick horrific stories to emotionally manipulated and terrify people into supporting his proposal, much like how some gun control activist do the same.
But these considerations are not my real concern. Politics and policy rarely are about facts and data, people, particularly in large numbers, are not motivated by cool reason but hot emotion. I am fearful of the symbol the wall represents and what that means to our national character. It is with a very specific intention that my title uses the word ‘America’ and not ‘The Unites States of America’ as those of two very different concepts.
An often-stated premise from President Trump is that you can’t have a country without borders, falsely imply that we do not have borders now. A state cannot exist without borders that I cannot argue with but a nation exists regardless of borders.
One definition of nation is a group of people with a common history, culture, or language that see themselves as something apart from the rest of humanity and it does not required that they control a state; the Kurds are a nation, tribe of American Natives are several nations, Palestinians are a nation. Often nation and state do go together, the Irish are a nation and a state, and the Japanese are a nation and a state. The United States of America is our state but our nation is America. Our national identity started out weak, strengthened over time, and was forged into its central concept through the fires of our Civil War and the assimilation of waves of new comers. Unlike most, if not all, of the nations of the world, our sense of nation comes not from being at one time a single ethnic people but from a population that share a set of ideals. Granted, we have never fully lived up to those ideals, but it is by defining ourselves by those ideals that we strive to come close to them and better ourselves as a people and as a state. The key concept here is that our entire national identity is bound up in the ideals we believe in, change those ideals and you change the nation, or end it all together.
Building the wall is a symbol of a change in a national character. It is a symbol on Americans turning their backs on the world, focusing on their interior issues, and starting a slide into global irrelevancy. Symbols are powerful things, not mere decorations on ideas, but ideas in themselves. To hand such a symbol on ourselves is to change what it means to be ourselves, it does not merely broadcast a change in a character it creates the change. For utterly practical we must not build the wall and for souls we must face the world and future not cower from it in terror.
