Sunday, August 2, 2020

White House Continues Building 13-foot High ‘Anti Climb’ Wall After Protests

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.        

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