As most of my friends know I’m not a fan of politics whatsoever, which means I’m not very aware of most current political issues, although there is one that’s been hard not to hear about or ignore these days like I do with anything else political in nature and it’s about the proposed Mexico border wall.
Because I didn’t know much about this issue, I decided to research a little further and discovered a few simple statistics. It’s meant to be 1,150 miles long, 40 feet high, 10 feet deep into the ground and 1 foot wide. It’s going to cost $8.7 billion in concrete and $3.6 billion in steel. Labor is currently being estimated at $12.3 billion. And there’s also the actual rest of the land acquisition that will cost around $200 million, leaving a whopping total of $25 billion at the bare minimum for this entire project.
$25 billion!
It’s hard for me to fathom that a wall costing $25 billion is more important than taking care of the forty percent of American adults who don’t have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency expense, or the forty-three percent of households who can’t even afford the basics to live, or the quarter of adults who annually skip medical care because they can’t afford it, or the twenty-two percent of adults who can’t pay all of their bills every month, or the 1.5 million who are homeless, or the more than 25 million who have a drug problem in this country, and so on and so forth. It’s also hard for me to fathom that a $25 billion-dollar wall would even stop the influx of illegal immigrants, as well as drugs and guns, because they probably would just find some other way to make it across the border.
In light of the main reason why this wall is being pushed so hard by the President, that being to prevent illegal immigration, my deepest truth is that I just don’t quite get it. Over the years, I’ve meant a number of individuals who were illegal immigrants and they were some of the nicest people who do the hardest work, and often for the cheapest wage, which for the record I never thought was fair. While there may be documented cases of people who are illegal immigrants that have added to the crime rates in our country, there’s a much greater share of those who haven’t and instead, have done the exact opposite to bring greater beauty, love, and light here. People who in my opinion have done a far better job of that than many of our own citizens, including myself when I used to be in the throngs of addiction.
Nevertheless, this proposed wall tends to remind me of an episode in the Brady bunch where a line was drawn down the middle of one of the kid’s rooms and all the anger it caused because of it. It also reminds me of when kids used to play in the sandbox and draw a line in the sand saying any toys on their side was theirs and theirs alone. And it even reminds me of all the other boundaries, borders, and walls that each of us have erected throughout our lives solely to keep people from getting to close, something that has most definitely created more disunity and discord than unity and harmony.
This is why I for one, am not for this Mexico Border wall and continue to hope that it will never come to fruition. While I absolutely don’t believe it will solve the problem the President thinks is such a major problem, I also feel it makes our country look even more segregated and standoffish than we already appear with the rest of the world, and maybe even from itself. Walls like this, or of any sort for that matter, usually only create more problems in the long run, which is why I’m doing everything I can these days to drop any of my own still remaining. Instead, I’m working on replacing them with open arms, as for so long, I erected such monstrosities that they always left me quite empty and devoid of feeling any real love and compassion for anyone or anything.
Regardless, for $25 billion, I truly hope for our country’s sake that rather than using it to limit our openness at our borders, that it will end up utilizing it for the many things within our borders that are currently crying out for assistance.
And maybe, it isn’t this Mexico Border wall that we should all be focusing on anyway.
Maybe we should be focusing on all those walls each of us keep constructing within our lives that continue to make us feel separate from each other? As maybe when we work on removing them, we might see how we are all connected and when we do, we’ll finally begin to realize there’s no need to ever have any sort of border wall erected within us or around us…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
