Project Steev

The Great Wall of America

Ruben Martinez, an author who is working on a new book about the border, recently visited us here in Tucson and went for a ride down to the San Pedro River's border crossing with some friends of mine. Today he has an op-ed in the LA Times about that trip and the recent border wall developments. He even mentions, obliquely, the No Borders Camp.

He has a great way with words, as with this beautiful and wise passage:

The Great Wall of America underscores a delusional faith in technology as the only solution to a problem that has nothing to do with technology. Ultimately, such Ozymandian monuments say more about the minds that conceived them than any "enemies" they actually contain. Think of the grandiose barriers of history -- the walls of Troy and China and Berlin; the wall that kept the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Think of their fate, their ultimate symbolism. Each began with the idea that people -- and their ideas -- could be restrained by barriers, just like rivers can be dammed. A simple feat of engineering.

And yet we believe that our wall will be the exception.