The Great Wall
Editor: The inauguration of president number 45 is less than a week away. When candidate Donald J. Trump first began crowing about it, sometime last summer if memory serves, media pundits thought it was some kind of joke, but couldn’t resist broadcasting show after show about it. Many prayed he’d fall behind the many GOP candidates in the presidential primaries and debates. It never happened. In fact he systematically eliminated each opponent, one by one, until he ran away with the Republican nomination. He didn’t back down from this campaign promise.
Now the newly convened Congress will soon be authorizing a very great deal of scanty taxpayer funds to begin construction. When it does, the “Great Wall,” as the president-elect calls it, will be the most colossal boondoggle in American history. Costs will run to more than $9 billion for what Texas’s 28th Congressional District Congressman Henry Cuellar has called, “A 14th century solution to a 21st century problem.” Congressmen and some congresswomen are not usually known for the resilience of their backbones. At this point in time what appears most likely is that Congress will initiate a funding bill in order to start construction of large segments along the American side of the US-Mexico border.
It will be good for construction bosses like President Trump, who will enjoy a mounting largess of federal funds, while other infrastructure projects like highways, rail and airports will go begging. Current UC Board of Regents Head and former Director of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano recently spoke about the wall with the following succinct sentence: “You show me a 50-foot wall, and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder.”
Immigrants have devised many methods to get under or over the already existing wall. Immigrants stationed helpers with a large net on the U.S. side while their partners brought up a pickup with a trampoline close to the wall on the Mexican side. Nineteen immigrants recently succeeded in jumping over safely and gaining access to the United States. Adding large segments to the existing wall won’t prevent the same thing from happening.
It would appear that Congress is about to collectively discard reason, not to mention all common sense much less logic. As has been reported by the press including the New York Times during the past week, the inflow of Mexicans to the U.S. has turned to a net outflow. Native born Mexicans and doubtlessly many bright young Hispanics and Mexican-American citizens are planning to return home to live in Mexico, not the other way around. In fact it is people from Central America escaping drug cartel violence who are the ones coming in the greatest current numbers. And most of these turn themselves in to our Border Patrol officers attempting to gain asylum here.
Write your representative in the House and Sen. Diane Feinstein in the Senate. Tell them you oppose building a wall across the border with Mexico. Worse than just a terribly wrongheaded idea, it will lead to massive increases, perhaps up to trillions of dollars in the national debt. No Mexican president in his right mind will ever allocate one peso to pay for the president-elect’s foolish and prohibitively expensive pork barrel boondoggle. Former Mexican president, Gustavo Fox, has tweeted, “Mexico will never f****** pay for any f****** wall!”
In the long run it may even cost most then the Iraq War. Please email our congressmen and women.
Frank Baumgardner
Santa Rosa
What’s Wrong with a Protest?
Editor: Recently, I had some painful (for me) interactions with the organizers of the Santa Rosa “Sonoma County Stands Together for Women” Rally and March scheduled for Jan. 21 at Santa Rosa City Hall. I misinterpreted the event’s press release announcing that two others and I were to be speakers for the event to mean that the event was an opportunity to stand up against the misogyny and racism of the president elect’s campaign promises.
I also sent the organizer a draft (per her request) of an email to encourage participation by the local disability community and in particular to draw their attention to HR 3765 which will make the Americans with Disabilities Act unenforceable. For this, the Santa Rosa organizer called to ask me that, given my strong personal opinions, wouldn’t I agree that it would be better if I weren’t a speaker. I had created a great offense, she said, when I forwarded the press release with my own views. The Santa Rosa rally, in support of the Women’s March on DC, she informed me, is to be nonpartisan and not critical of anyone.
Nonpartisan, she explained, meant the rally is not to be a protest and Trump is not to be mentioned. I was then barred from the event’s Facebook page. Friends of mine who commented on the FB page that it should be a protest had their comments removed. My email asking for a public clarification that the Santa Rosa rally is not to be a protest went unanswered. While it may just be that the Santa Rosa organizers are uncomfortable with dissent or discourse, it is that the word protest is to be avoided that is really disturbing, and it’s not just the Santa Rosa event. The websites for the Women’s Marches in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose state the same – the events are not to be a protest. An article in The Washington Post Jan. 3 states that even the Women’s March on Washington organizers insist the march is not anti-Trump.
Since when did a protest become inappropriate or a bad thing? As a veteran of many protests for the civil rights of people with disabilities, I know that protests are a very effective way to communicate with our political leaders. As part of a protest that was staged in 10 cities across the country, I participated in the 1977 takeover of the fourth floor of the San Francisco Federal building for three and a half weeks. Without this protest, President Carter would have reinstituted the shameful “separate but equal” doctrine. Without this protest, we would not have the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
No matter what the organizers of the Women’s Marches say, inevitably the women and men who attend the marches throughout the country will be there in protest and to speak against Trump. We won’t be disrupting our lives at great expense and trouble just to sing Kumbaya on a cold January day. We will be there to protest what the Trump administration promises to do; return government control of women’s bodies, jerk health care away from 30 million Americans, ghettoize Muslims, deport and destroy millions of Latino families, ban LGBTQ marriages and civil rights, overturn climate protection regulations and pull the U.S. out of the Paris Accord, etc. etc. etc.
Women and men will march because we are angry, rightfully and appropriately so. It is our anger that will fuel our work to protect civil rights and climate protection in the coming four years, not a “reverent, festive candle light march” as promoted on the San Francisco March website. The Women’s March organizers need to wake up and smell the piss and vinegar. Women are not sugar and spice, and it’s the wrong time to be everything nice.
HolLynn D’Lil
Graton
