Ostensibly for defense, it seems like humans have been building walls pretty much forever. The Chinese may have built the most famous one, which stretches more than 13,000 miles, took centuries to build (and rebuild), cost tens of thousands of lives, and is visible from space. Throughout their empire, the Romans, too, were famous wall builders. Typically, high walls and fortified encampments defended that empire from “barbarians” (native folk): peoples like the Anglos, Franks, Gauls, Scots, Irish, Teutons, Celts, Germanic tribes, etc. Famously, Emperor Hadrian in 122 A.D. began building the 73-mile wall that marked the frontier across the wilds of Britain.

However spectacular in scope, these structures usually failed as anything beyond temporary defenses. However high, wide or long you might make them, history shows that try as you might, people will breach, climb, obviate or sweep away your barriers. Regardless of how well devised a plan, over time, human life cannot be so neatly contained.

Silly wall plans do even worse. In the last century, after WWI, anticipating future German aggression, the French built the “Maginot Line,” a defensive fortification. The Germans were so impressed by it they went around it. 

In East Berlin, the former communist regime built an infamous wall whose remains you can still visit. Now it is an art exhibit. That wall simply tried to keep people, including their minds and thoughts, inside. That was another impossibly silly task. Neither fenced in nor banished, the human mind cannot be forever segregated (die Gedanken sind frei) by any physical barrier.

Which brings us to the contemporary and continuingly dumbly proposed construction of a small piece of the Trump southern border wall. Remember, that is the one that Mexico never paid for, but is currently budgeted by the Republican-controlled Congress for $46.5 billion of your taxes. 

In the face of strong local opposition to a portion of the construction of the wall in Laredo, TX, Mayor Victor D. Treviño claimed that the wall is coming, “regardless of whether it works or not.” He added, “We might as well collaborate, or negotiate.” (NY Times 11/21/2025). Mayor Trevino was talking about the intentions of state and national politicians and the Trump administration to build some sort of wall—really, it seems, any sort of wall.

I suspect in a few years, when the dust of the Trump administration settles and some part of the wall stands, there will be a new unwanted tourist attraction in Laredo; perhaps it can become an artist wall or a diving facility into the bordering Rio Grande river. Nonetheless, all Americans will have paid, not to feed the hungry, but rather to feed some old man’s ego.

John Pace lives in Honesdale, PA. He writes on Substack at John in the Woods.