About ten years ago I was president of my HOA board. I live in a gated community. For the first year and a half of living in the neighborhood, we had no gate because construction was ongoing.

After the last house was finished, the gate went in. It often had problems operating, and there was a push by some residents to rip it out. But others insisted it stay, because the gate was one of the things that attracted them to the neighborhood, and the safety of the gate was important to them.

The problem is that the gate doesn’t provide much security. And it’s expensive. We’ve replaced the whole system once, after spending a lot of time and money trying to fix the original gate.

Every house has a gate code, and a remote to open the gate. The code can be punched in at the call box, or people can call from the call box and a homeowner can buzz them in. Everyone gives their gate code out-to the delivery companies, to the cleaning services, to their friends and family. And the gate is set up so that it allows a car to go through, but if another car is close to entering the gate stays open. Otherwise it would be opening and closing incessantly.

Behind my part of the neighborhood is a small wood and a ravine. We have a decorative fence that delineates where the hill leads to the ravine, although some of our property actually extends into the wood itself. As marked by another fence.

One day as I was watering plants on my deck, I saw something stirring in the wood. I figured it was a deer or something else caught and afraid.

It was a man. A white man, with his jeans on backwards. Climbing over the fence in the ravine and then over the decorative fence. He told me he had lost his wallet in the wood and was looking for it. I as...doubtful.

My obvious and long winded point is that fences and walls and gates can slow things down, and maybe keep out the lazy but the determined will get in. I’ve seen another man come out through the same area of the wood. Never mind that the front of the neighborhood has two hand gates, aligned with the automatic gate, and leading from the sidewalk outside the community to the sidewalk that passes by the first two rows of houses. There’s even enough room outside the gate to park and then walk right in. In short, the gate doesn’t keep us safe. It’s expensive and at most serves to control traffic flow, but it doesn’t keep anyone out.

Now imagine wasting five billion dollars on a structure that is as ineffective. And which contravenes the legal right to seek asylum. And which cuts off humans in need of help simply because they were born in a different part of the continent.

Trump’s wall is a stunt, an expensive and pointless racist beacon to his immorality and gross stupidity.

So for this Root Recommends I recommend making noise to your elected officials and tell them #NoWallNotNowNotEver