[NYTr] We Have Nothing to Lose But Our Walls

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Sep 18, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/ross09182007.html


America's Great Wall:

Where Will the Workers Go When They Finish It?

By JOHN ROSS

SAN FRANCISCO - We are being walled in. Every second that we stay here,
they are adding another inch to the wall they are building along the
southern border of this country and the northern one of the next
country down.  The border wall will eventually extend 1964 miles
between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, roughly six times the
length of the wall the Israelis are throwing up inside Palestine and 20
times that of the Berlin Wall, which once separated the totalitarians
from the so-called free world. 

The Wall is a project of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the
Army Corps of Engineers, the National Guard, and a gaggle of corporate
predators.  It is only congruent that Israeli security planners were
brought in for consultations and a sort of perverse poetic justice that
a San Diego subcontractor has been indicted for exploiting the labor of
the very undocumented workers the Wall is being built to keep out. 

Those who build this Wall tell us that it will keep illegal people out
of the United States of North America but no person is illegal.  It is
not yet against the law to be alive except maybe in Bush's Iraq.
Although the Border Wall is designed to keep workers on the other side,
the goods they produce and the services they provide are perfectly free
to pass through the barrier from one corporate predator to another.

Homeland Security, a wholly owned subsidiary of the globalizers of
greed, argues that they are building this Wall for our own protection.
That the illegal people on the other side are all potential terrorists.
This is the same reason that Israel builds the notorious "security
barrier" which prevents Palestinian farmers from tending their fields
and the olive trees they have nurtured since biblical times.  This is
the same reason that the Army Corps of Engineers throws up blast walls
between neighborhoods in Baghdad and between those neighborhoods and
the increasingly vulnerable Green Zone.  Indeed, we all live in the
Green Zone now. 

The Army Corps of Engineers is in the wall business.  Perhaps the only
wall the corps does not build is between the lower ninth ward of New
Orleans and the sea which engulfed that vibrant black neighborhood two
years ago this past August 29. The Army Corps of Engineers has its
priorities.

We watch them as they wall us in, as if it is not happening to us.  We
watch them as they pour the concrete, string up the razor wire, install
the searchlights and the electronic sensors, the surveillance cameras,
the armed patrols and snarling dogs and unmanned drones.  We do not
understand yet that they are trying to keep us from breaking out of the
compound. 

They need to keep us walled in here so that we will know no other
reality.  So that we will always keep buying their useless junk and
pledging allegiance to corporate vampires.  There is a reason why they
call it Wall Street.

We are allowing them to wall us in into their war.  Bush lays it on
trowel by trowel.  It's just like building fences down on the ranch.
That's what he calls the Border Wall.  A fence.  You thought there was
a way out of here?  That the Democrats would throw up ladders to get
across this Wall of War? The fix has been in since last November's
elections. 

Now Bush flies at night to a photo op in Anbar, evading the press corps
in the underground passages beneath the White House.  Now General
BetrayUs, a ventriloquist's dummy of Goebbelian dimensions, oozes to a
willingly bamboozled Congress that Iraq is all better now.  Now Nancy
Pelosi and Barbara Lee roll over at their Master's Voice and vote to
tag a few hundred more miles on to this Wall of lies.  We will never be
able to leave now. We have walled ourselves into Iraq. 

I am a writer.  I build my walls out of words but the only word for our
times is arrrggghhh!

We are the builders of our own walls.  We have walled ourselves into
our own fears, bolted the doors and windows and hunkered down deep in
the compartmentalized bunkers they force us to rent each month with our
blood and our sweat.  We do not even know who lives on the other side
of the six inches of sheet rock that separates us from our next-door
neighbors.  All we can think is that they want our stuff.  Bush said
that.  They want what we have.  According to the newest numbers, there
are nine guns for every 10 red-blooded citizens of the United Snakes
(note - undocumented workers are not included in this sampling.)

Fear is a big item in the wall business.  You can't build one without
it. The bigger the fear the taller the Wall and the taller the Wall,
the greater the profits. The Blackwaters and the Dynecorps have made
their fortunes keeping the looters at bay.  How many folks on your
block or in your building are employed to guard someone else's property
or person? 

Why do they hate us so much, Bush wailed as the towers were tumbling
six 9/11s ago now?  No one ever quite answered that extremely crucial
question. Ignorance requires active participation and we are walling
ourselves into the mind-numbing ignorance of the eternally lobotomized. 

We choose to avoid what is on the other side of the Wall.  We do not
know what it looks like over there or how it smells.  The garbage pits
of Tijuana where our own offal is dumped every day to the delight of
emaciated Indian scavengers.  The bloated bellies of the starvation
army stretching from TJ to Tierra del Fuego. The stench of shit and
blood hanging heavily over Baghdad this morning. 

We don't care. We are so scared by it all that we can't allow ourselves
to care.  We punch up the remote and the screen hides us from the rest
of the world. We bust up a joint and forget that we live in the shadow
of the Wall and we cannot get out of here. 

We are stuck inside the intestinal Walls of the beast's belly. There
isn't much light in here and we cannot see out. We cannot see how we
look to others.  We cannot see what is in their eyes.  We will never
learn the answer to Bush's question after 9/11 took his mind away.  Why
do they hate us so much?

I have a dream.  It is their nightmare.  I dream that we are locked up
in some maximum security prison, maybe old Folsom or Abu Ghraib or the
T. Don Hutto detention center, and the word on the grapevine is
"jailbreak!"  We listen up for the signal and when it comes, we let
each other out of our cages, overwhelm the guards, and scale the Wall
on ropes fashioned from our bed sheets.  At the top we stop to catch
our collective breath and take a look at what the world really looks
like on the other side.  For once, we cannot see the Wall.

John Ross’s left eye was taken from his head last week.  He is
recuperating in San Francisco.  If you have further information about
the final resting place of his eye write johnross at igc.org.