So I had a lengthy flight today, and my copy of Roger Waters' new "The Wall" concert/biopic came in a few days ago, so I watched it on the plane. One scene in particular, "Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2", got me thinking. During that song on Roger's Wall tour, local school kids were brought onstage to sing, dance and generally mock the headmaster puppet. I had forgotten what the shirts given to the kids said:
Fear builds walls
And he's right, you know? Americans have good intentions, I think. We seek to protect our own, as is our right to do. Thing is, Americans are stupid. We're conditioned to follow the first clown who tells us what to do in times of crisis. Woodrow Wilson's dogged refusal to respond to an increasingly aggressive Germany could almost made WWI a lot bloodier and a lot closer to home, Jimmy Carter sent us to the toilet in the economic crash, George W. Bush led us into Hell when he perverted 9/11 into profiteering and now Trump offers an extreme, racist solution to a problem that is only going to be made worse if he has his way--assuming he actually believes what he's saying. And Americans are eating up. Know why? We want instant gratification.
As a nation, we're accustomed to the most expedient solution. Don't feel like cooking? Order a pizza. It'll be there in 30 minutes, which is less time than you'd have spent cooking and cleaning anyway. Tired of vacuuming? Go buy an automated vacuum. Roomba clones are as low as $150 on Amazon, and the real thing is only $300. When you consider how much time you'll save in a year by not having to vacuum your floors, it more than makes sense. Don't want to walk the dog? Install a dog door and never worry about it again. Hell, if you believe the ads on TV, there are a handful of gastric bypass centers in Dallas that no longer advertise the procedure as a last-ditch effort to help the morbidly obese. One of them goes so far as to say that if you need to lose 25 lbs. or more and you struggle to stick to a diet and exercise regimen, invasive surgery that will kill 1 in every 200 people who have it done is the answer. We're dumb and lazy. Sorry, America, that's just how it is, so when a handful of renegade Muslims (most of whom were home-grown, btw) engage in stabbings, shootings or, um, clock fabrication, we get scared, and we don't know what to do. All we know is that you've got Barack Obama offering zero in the way of credible solutions, Bernie Sanders saying that the way to end Islamic terrorism is to invite all the Islamic terrorists over for lunch, Ben Carson making, well, as much sense as Ben Carson ever does, and Hillary being Hillary. Oh, and then there's Trump. He knows what will solve the problem. Lock out all the Muslims! Let them eat bacon cake (which sounds really good, btw)! And because we're Americans and the laziest, most expedient solution to any problem is the one favored by a huge subset of the population, they flock to Trump.
Here's the flip side of that coin: the terrorists are inhuman beasts, and they need to be rooted out and sent on their way to those 72 virgins before they can hurt anyone over here. I've said it before and I believe it wholeheartedly: if someone outside the United States is found to have credible ties to ISIS, they need to die. If a legal US resident is found to have credible ties to ISIS, they need to be locked in a hole with no human contact--aside from the guy who comes in a couple times a day to waterboard them. ISIS is that dangerous of an enemy that I would be ok with the use of torture on known ISIS sympathizers. I'd gladly violate the human rights of a million terrorists if it meant that one attack, here or abroad, was stopped as a result.
But here's the thing: these terrorists are smart. Really smart. They know the secret to organizing a terrorist organization: don't organize it. In some ways, ISIS is the Anonymous of the terrorist world. They're hard to find and hard to stop, especially when they're already on our shores.
But that's not what makes them smartest. What makes them smartest is that they're playing us. 14 people died in Inland Empire, and now 35% of the population wants to close our borders to Muslims. That's a move that would be equalled in sheer discrimination and hate only by the Japanese internment camps and slavery itself. There is no faster way to radicalize someone against you than by telling them that they are not your equal purely because you pray to different deities (actually, you kind of don't, but that's beside the point). If Trump were to say, "We need to stop immigration from countries known to be hotbeds of terrorism," he'd have a solution that would make a lot more sense and be a lot harder to exploit as an act of pure, hateful spite. But if he said that, he wouldn't have his sound byte, and he wouldn't be playing off the fear of his base. And, as Mr. Waters himself said, "Fear builds walls."
Donald Trump is potentially as dangerous as ISIS. He's not a terrorist himself, but if he's elected President and builds a literal wall to keep Mexicans south and a figurative wall to keep Muslims east, ISIS won't have much work to do. Plenty of Muslims would practically radicalize themselves after seeing what the leader of the Great Satan has to say about Islam, Allah and their homelands.
I regarded Trump as a joke for a while, then as a candidate that I'd be sort of ok with if it came down to Trump or Clinton. Now, I don't want him in the White House. I don't want him near the White House, aside from taking a public tour. If the Texas primary looks like it's going to come down to a very close vote between Carson/Cruz or Trump, I'll put my name in for Carson or Cruz (sorry, Rand). I'll vote for Hillary to keep Trump out of office if that's what it comes to. It's my fear that a Trump Presidency would lead to war on American soil, and it wouldn't be the type of war that SEAL Team 6 could swoop in on a stealth Blackhawk and win for us. It would be a healthy number of terrorists, either part of ISIS, part of a sleeper cell or acting purely on their own, versus an America that has no clue how to identify them, let alone stop them. Of course, the natural progression of widespread attacks on American soil is martial law and suspension of rights and privileges, and that's the sort of thing that my political beliefs are centered pretty strongly against letting happen.
And yes, I recognize the irony in this entire post. "Fear builds walls." Indeed it does--like the wall around Donald Trump and his supporters that I've built for myself over the last few days.
TL;DR version - Roger Waters is a prophet.
