International Friending

 IN SAN DIEGO, hard up against the pacific ocean and spanning both sides of the border, are several lovely acres of what has been named "Friendship Park", a place where Mexican and American nationals can freely mingle, briefly refuting the efficacy of barriers and borders, before going home, home to the usual bordered and barricaded world. First lady pat Nixon baptized it formally in 1971. Ronald Reagan approved of it, both before and after granting asylum to millions of undocumented Mexicans in the nineteen eighties. In those days, Mexican immigrants, legal or otherwise, were not cast by a racist American president as ""rapists" and "murderers", accused of being "sent" to the U.S., as if as part of an organized conspiracy, and Republicans were decent people with some measure of compassion. A small parcel of well manicured land, free of government tyranny, border agents, walls, and barbed wire,where ordinary people, if only briefly, can be citizens of the world. But now the great monstrous wall of Trump is piercing through it,bisecting friendships, truncating harmony, bringing back the old familiar ignorance and mistrust. Before he leaves office, Donald Trumps seems determined to do as much damage, to harm as many people as possible.Miles of border wall are being built at a furious pace, because the racists haters responsible for it know that their time is limited, because incoming president Biden has pledged to build not another inch of border wall.The next administration has pledged to lead America forward into a kinder, more compassionate, more harmonious state of mind and being. Or maybe its just that Biden is truly going to make America great again, as she was before the prevaricating monster stole the presidency with foreign assistance and a malign agenda predicated on anger and hatred. When Donald Trump is at long last gone, which will be soon but none too soon, and his traitorous mob of vicious angry supporters is finally quietened a bit,perhaps the senseless disjointed remnants of the wall of hatred will stand, like Ozymandias, as a dead relic of hateful, detestable, useless lunacy. nothing better can be expected. Then perhaps Friendship Park and return to being Friendship Park, and children will no longer be separated from their parents by gestapo like goons and locked in cages in he false name of restored American greatness and American can get about the business of actually becoming great, rather than trying to retreat into some imaginary greatness of the past which never really existed after all.