Walls, Bridges, and Sustainability

If you copy and paste “Walls vs. Bridges” into Google, you’ll be reading for a very long time about the origins and current meaning of this phrase.  Summarizing the discussion in present-day world politics, it comes down to two major opposing viewpoints:

WALLS

Trump is fighting like a cornered wolverine to build a wall along the U.S. southern border, securing the United States from the influx of desperate people seeking safety and the prospect of a less miserable life than they were suffering in Central America.  Similar efforts are underway in Europe, for example, the efforts of Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban to wall off his country from immigrants from the south.

Throughout history, we have seen that such attempts always meet opposition.  Because people are good and kind by nature, they enter the world with an empathy for those less fortunate.  They have no innate tendency to want to turn away those in need, and thus they need to be cajoled, frightened or misinformed in order to accept the turning away of those begging desperately for help.

That notwithstanding, through the ages, populations all around the globe have been pushed to accepting wall-building; this is routinely accomplished by fierce rhetoric attempting to divide the citizenry, and disseminating lies and exaggerations about the danger represented by immigrants.  This is supported by strict restrictions on the (previously) free press, the repression of dissidents, and the severe punishment of those who oppose the walls/bans/etc. as unpatriotic or traitorous.  (Both Trump and Orban are masters of this type of demagoguery.)

BRIDGES

The builders of walls routinely face opposition from the voices of compassion.  In today’s world, we people like Pope Francis, who here, Urges Young Catholics To Build Bridges, Not Walls. Though the Pontiff didn’t mention Trump by name, he made an apparent reference to Trump’s border plans, where he said at a recent youth rally, “Those who build walls are trying to divide people and box them in.”

WHERE THIS IS ULTIMATELY GOING

Let’s look at some facts, see where this is going, determine if we believe that this is a satisfactory route, and, if not, what we can do about it.

1) The world population is growing, and so is the demand for its resources: food, potable water, energy, shelter, and jobs that pay living wages.

2) The resources are not keeping up with the expanding population, exerting ever-increasing strain on all the world’s people, except for the affluent. Yes, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, but now the pace at which this is happening has reached a full gallop.

3) Resources are further stretched as the environment starts to collapse around us, with its dying oceans, droughts, floods, wildfires, hurricane winds, and rising sea levels.

4) Over a very short period of time, the direction of world politics has pivoted abruptly towards the extreme right-wing.  What has happened in the U.S. and Hungary are only two examples of nascent right-wing populism that, as noted here, started to take shape in the 1990s with the establishment of parties in the legislatures of various democracies, including Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Romania and Sweden; entered coalition governments in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Chile, Finland, Greece, Italy, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Slovakia and Switzerland; and led governments in Japan, Brazil, Colombia, India, Turkey, and Poland.

Let’s look at this from the standpoint of sustainability.  How are the citizens of Earth to manage the intersection of the four bullet points above?

Put alternatively: How many walls can we build?  Is there a limit of human suffering past which we will say, “no more?”  How satisfying will it be to live on a planet with tens of thousands of miles of 30-foot walls of steel and barbed wire, that we use to make sure that starving people with dark skin cannot come for our food?

Doesn’t it seem more natural to look openly and honestly at this horrible trajectory and change course while we still have a relatively free press and open internet that enable us to think and communicate together?  If we can make this work, the time is now.