The Wall Between You and Me
Backtracking to 2016, President Trump rocked the world with his ridiculous notion about building a wall that stretched for 2,000 miles across the Mexican border. Soon after this, the first construction began and stone on stone was merged with concrete to create the first 13 miles of the wall – by the end of next year, 450 miles are expected to be complete.
You see, with the creation of one wall, all hell broke loose. The archaic and – quite frankly, nauseating – racist spirit arose in America, giving rise to hate crimes committed against people who didn’t have skin that was milky, pale or white.
According to statistics, after the announcement of the wall, the hate crime took on many forms and multiplied in numbers. The alarming amount of hate soon began to seep from racism and ethnicity and into other facets of society like sexuality, religion and class. And it transcended into other nations in the form of other kinds of chaos.
The world began to see armed gunmen shooting down innocent people at a club for the sake of the heterosexual cause (Pulse nightclub incident, Orlando, United States of America, 2016); gunmen attacking celebrators of the new year in a country where Islam and worldly pleasures butt heads (Reina nightclub Incident, Istanbul, Turkey, 2017); a Hispanic man being attacked with acid, an old and brutal manner of inflicting pain (white man throws acid on Hispanic man, Milwaukee, United States of America, 2019). According to recent reports, Chicago has seen a rise in 60% more hate crimes than ever before.
And I’m left wondering – is the wall really at the Mexican border of the US, or is it here around each and every one of us, in every single city in the world?
The apathy in the world is alarming. With 2019 coming to an end, the walls we’ve built around ourselves in our growing indifference and lack of concern have manifested in the world forgetting about Yemenis still starving, Kashmiris still in a black hole, Iraqis still begging to be saved, Lebanese going broke, Bolivians fighting rigged elections, Chile clamoring for equality, Panama wanting power for the people and Haitians running out of fuel.
There is so much calamity all around us, which ironically unites all skin, sexualities, genders, classes and other classifications as one – but where is this realization? Is it lacking because of the walls we’ve built around ourselves as members of certain nations, cities, brotherhoods and creeds? Is the construct of defined identities as countrymen of certain places, of people of certain religions, of people with different skin dividing us?
There is a wall between you and me, and it’s made from stone that is inconsistent and painted with your negligence and mine. It has barbed wired and no peephole and slowly, it’s blinding us all. We are losing what it is to be human, moral and just – and all of this is lost in the rubble of the centuries’ old trauma that the world has seen.
