The Border Wall

Banksy's take on the border wall

If I told you about a great movie I saw, meal I ate, or experience I had and bragged that it was the greatest thing I had ever had, would you secretly want some of that?Well, of course you would!

So why wouldn't anyone in the world not want to live in North America?

About 15 years ago, I was in southern California speaking to a friend of mine who was educating me who Cesar Chavez was, how his leadership transformed the system, and the workers in the San Joachin Valley. Many of these workers were illegal immigrants, but the country turned a blind eye because few white people wanted these labour intensive, and low paying jobs.

Around the same time, I had a friend who lived in New York City and she was married to a man from South America. They were living in the States because it was apparently easier to live as an illegal alien in NYC than Canada. She explained to me how there were a lot of illegals working in the States and nobody cared much about this immigration epidemic.

That was until these immigrants were Muslim.

It seems as soon as the countries the US were attacking, like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and a handful of others who were greatly affected by these wars started to leave their countries, this immigration issue all of a sudden became really important. Up until this point, the immigrants who were coming into the US were mainly Christian, and more importantly, they were doing menial labour that no white person would ever want to do. So, if it benefited society, this was considered win-win.

And now with the government shut down in the US, the mention of this border wall keeps popping up disguised as "border security" when it has nothing to do with security at all. It has everything to do with keeping non-Christians out of the country in the facade of fear mongering.

If there was a real threat to Americans, it comes from within, not from other countries. Domestic Americans kill 10,000+ more Americans with gun violence every year than their nearest rival. Yet, there is little to nothing being done about this issue. Nobody is asking for 5 billion dollars to fix this problem because the NRA has paid off every representative and their campaigns for re-election. So this topic gets re-visited on social media whenever a classroom of school children are being murdered in their places of learning, or people in their places of worship. THAT, is real terrorism. But "these people" don't want to talk about that, because it's not on their agenda.

If these people wanted to spend 5 billion dollars of border security, they could create infrastructure behind the scenes using technology that would invest in systems and its people to create a customized solution. Building a wall is like using coal, which this president seems to think is the wave of the future.

I had a mentor in sales that once shared an invaluable insight. In sales like in life, people will give you a reason for something they don't like. The trick in sales is determining the reason they give you and then finding out the REAL reason. The faster you can ascertain the real reason before they know it, you have a better chance to get the sale. So in this situation, the border wall is the reason these people give you. It's not the real reason.

So let's be real. These people don't want a wall, because that's clearly the most inefficient way to keep the "deplorables" out. Instead, they want to align themselves with the signal which says they support dividing themselves from refugees or immigrants in need, who want a tiny taste of the Freedom the greatest country in the world says it has. These people think Freedom is so finite that it can't be shared with people who aren't fitting into the mould of people like them. Historically, these are the people didn't want Women to have a vote, didn't want people of colour to have the same inalienable rights as they did, and they certainly don't want Muslims swimming in their pool of Freedom.

This has nothing to do with border security. We all want safe border security. But this has nothing to do with border security and everything to do with the mentality of racism and bigotry which has been the main separating point in the Divided States of America since it's inception. And this has been the underlying current which presents its ugly face, over and over in a reincarnated dream for the United States of America.

This time around, it just looks like a border wall.