Trump’s
inner prison — the enormous impenetrable walls he’s built around
his heart — is manifesting again and again on the outside. Beyond
chilling, disturbing, dangerous, scary, and sad!
Thank
you to my friend Rande Neukam for sharing this article and for his
spot on and well articulated thoughts below, which I’m moved to
also share with this piece:
“It
was '65 when my family stopped in D.C. and we visited the WH on the
way to our grandparents. Heady stuff to this 14 yr. old -- Dolly
Madison, Lincoln, JFK. Then in '81, after tooling around D.C. in a
beat up VW Beetle (believing I'd never have to pay for all the
parking tickets I was racking up --wrong), Aria and I walked through
the fringe-cause protesters in Lafayette Park, peering through the
fence. Post-Nixon & Watergate, it still had the pull of gravitas,
of marbled history, and I was kind of proud of the chance to finally
show it to her.
And
here we are today. A wall, the fact that it's 13 ft. high, that it
seals off the WH from the people. It's ugly and brutal. It lacks only
watch towers and a moat to complete the image, a cheap erector set
built by a little paranoid man. If a building could only weep in
humiliation ...
Illegal
immigration fired his candidacy, front-loaded his presidency, and
fueled his bibbed-brained rallies as a dependable trope. It
underscored his racism, exposed his migrant wave lie as the cynical
mid-term ploy that it was, personified his indifferent brutality to
border kids in cages, and martyred DACA Dreamers like red meat to his
base.
So,
as a strange, poetically unintended consequence, he got his wall. And
Mexico -- because it bore the humiliating brunt of his racism -- did
in that way at least pay for it.
But
Christ, over the past 4 years so have we.”
The White House is on course to complete a planned multi-million dollar perimeter fence replacement as construction continues.
Pictures shared online showed construction advancing along Pennsylvania Avenue, where views of the White House are expected to be impaired when the new fence is completed next year.
Parts of the street have been blocked off and a temporary wall has been erected, as construction takes place.
Under plans that pre-date Donald Trump’s administration, the White House will upgrade all permitter steel fencing with new 13-foot “anti-climb” fences.
The enhanced security measures also include wider and stronger fence posts, intrusion detection technology, and “future security threat” mitigation, according to the plans.
The current fence, at six-foot tall, was said to have permitted multiple intrusion attempts and lapses in security over the past decade.
One incident in 2014 saw an armed man enter the White House, which led to the resignation of the then chief of the US Secret Service.
The Secret Service, in partnership with the US National Parks Service, says some 3,500 feet of steel fencing will encircle the White House upon the project’s completion.
The construction, which began a year ago, comes after temporary 8-foot barricades and an enhanced security zone were created to counteract Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Washington DC last month.
That decision, which came amid nationwide anger over the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd – an unarmed black man – was condemned as walling-off protesters from “the people’s house”.
“It’s a sad commentary that the [White] House and its inhabitants have to be walled off,” said District of Colombia mayor Muriel Boswer last month.
Please go here for the original article: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/white-house-border-anti-climb-wall-us-trump-protests-a9639761.html?utm_source=reddit.com
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