What You Get With a Border Wall

 For everyone thinking a wall separating the US from Mexico will solve the immigration problem and the fentanyl crisis, read these stories:

Israel-Hamas war live: Israeli death toll from Hamas attacks rises to 600, as fighting continues in south of country and Gaza 

BREAKING | Robbie Keane forced to shelter in panic room and flee Israel after Hamas attack – reports 

Israel at War | At Least 600 Israelis Killed, 2,000 Wounded as Surprise Infiltration, Massive Barrages Rock Israel; Civilians and Soldiers Held Hostage in Gaza .

 From hubris to humiliation: The 10 hours that shocked Israel

We do not have enemies on our borders. We have people fleeing the desolation that is Venezuela. 

Fentanyl will come into the United States so long as Americans want cheap painkillers.

The MAGA crowed will not pay attention to these problems. They are looking for power over the rest of us, not solving America's problems.

The thinking behind MAGA is not without precedent:

Orwellian nightmares: What I learned about today’s rage culture from rewriting 1984 :

But Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn’t a warning against a university’s inclusivity statement. It was a warning about men like Trump and Putin and the violent mass movements they inspire. Men like Erdoğan, Modi, Orbán, and Maduro: events such as Duterte’s mass killings in the Philippines, Bukele’s mass arrests in El Salvador, Xi’s ubiquitous surveillance and social credit system and concentration camps and institutionalised torture in China. Orwell’s great political works speak to our current moment, when seemingly every country is infested with would-be autocrats, using the old playbooks with their lines about “enemies of the people” and “lying media” and “globalists”.

When my Nineteen Eighty-Four book was announced, described as a “feminist retelling”, I was treated to a personal experience of how far things had gone. The news attracted a storm of misogynist and antisemitic abuse in rightwing tweets, blogs, YouTube videos, even newspaper articles. This was long before the novel was available to be read – before I’d barely written a few chapters. Still, all the attackers were sure what would be in it: a full-throated endorsement of Big Brother. They also declared there was a plot to replace Nineteen Eighty-Four in school curricula with my book – despite the fact that it was being published in the US by Orwell’s publisher and had been endorsed by the Orwell estate, two organisations that would be out of pocket were Nineteen Eighty-Four to be dropped. It’s still unclear to me whether the attackers believed what they were saying. Were they lying or deluded? Or was this a real feat of doublethink – the ability to believe two contrary ideas at once – where no such distinction can be drawn?

In his essay Looking Back on the Spanish War, Orwell observes how we underestimate the risk that fascism, or “a combination of several fascisms”, will prevail throughout the whole world because, “nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run”. This is a fatal delusion. “We have become too civilised to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil.” We no longer have the luxury to indulge in quibbles about civility, nor do we have the time for an emotionally satisfying but futile Two Minutes Hate. We must speak, write, make jokes, argue, fight, with an eye only to what is most effective. We must organise against fascism as if our lives depended on it. They do. The threat is here; the time Orwell warned about is now.

Klan War: how Ulysses S Grant took the fight to the extreme right 

The 18th president took office in a complex period: the Reconstruction years that followed the civil war. Black Americans had won unprecedented freedoms with the passage of the 14th amendment, which aided former slaves by guaranteeing citizenship, with protection on an equal level to all other US citizens. Yet such hard-won gains were menaced by vengeful white people, most notoriously through the Klan, which was founded not long after the war in Pulaski, Tennessee.

“It was the first organized terror movement in American history,” Bordewich says. “Its stock-in-trade was violence – intimidation and violence. People were beaten, people were flogged, people were lynched, people were shot. People’s homes were raided, they were dragged outdoors and flogged in the streets.”

And, he says, the violence often included “truly horrifying sadism”.

“It liberated the absolute worst impulses among” its members, Bordewich says, adding: “You can see this in today’s terrorist movements in other parts of the world – al-Qaida, IS. These are the organizations the Klan should be compared to. We think of terrorism today as something happening in other countries. It happened here in the 1870s.”

 What has remained as unchanged as the racist, fascist thinking behind policies is the ultimate failure of those policies in solving problems.

Americans need to make a choice – grow up and shed its old thinking and take on the hard thinking and patience needed for solving our issues, or prove ourselves as never great, as smaller than our ideals.

 

Oh, yeah, one last argument for walls as nothing but moronic, useless, short ideas meant to satisfy those incapable of anything but immediate gratification for those easily led, the herd of sheep who will not or cannot think for themselves, who do not think at solving real difficulties rather than to go back to grazing on their own patch:

 

Fix Venezuela.

Fix American's desire for a drugged existence.

 Until those items are fixed, a border wall is a bad joke.

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