After 9/11, post-apocalyptic America is slowly crumbling into a sea of fears (no thanks to the nation’s current administration). And not just new fears, the embers of old worries are being fanned into psychedelic bonfires of horror. Among them: the dread that Mad Max and his rag-tag sand-bombing horde will invade every peaceful neighbourhood and inhabit a fortified high rise tower from which to terrorize the innocent while adding insult to injury by sunblocking backyard veggie gardens.
Translation (for those who are not American): local government will upzone neighbourhoods to allow the construction of public housing of medium, or even high density.
Explanation: America’s national perception, from the highest government official to the lowliest yet-still-middle-class citizen, is that the defective genes of public housing inhabitants have created slums that can be attributed to solely to the behaviour of irresponsible, undesirable, undeserving lower class tenants. Bad planning, underfunding or bad management? Never!
So, with many cities short of land and some, such as New York City, contemplating yet another land reclamation project from surrounding waters1, just imagine the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth once America becomes fully aware of Hong Kong’s plan to reclaim a new, multi-billion dollar artificial island from the sea, one that will provide affordable public housing for as many as 175,000 people!
Read more about Hong Kong’s plans at CNN: Hong Kong reveals plan to build one of the world’s largest artificial islands
Now consider the implications: these land walls between countries become obsolete and unnecessary:
Hadrian’s Wall, currently keeping the Scots out of England,
The Great Wall, still doing a bang-up job of keeping the Mongol hordes from invading China,
The U.S. Southern Border Wall, designed to keep Mexican Armies, along with their Central American camp followers, from retaking the Alamo,
And the still-in-the-planning-stages Even Greater Wall of Canada, to stretch along the 45th parallel, preventing Americans from cross-border shopping until they rescind the steel and aluminum tariffs imposed as an emergency measure to prevent Canada from somehow biting American on its backside.
The future? Instead of national barriers, will there be a revival of city walls to prevent invasion of cities from offshore slum islands? Walls that prevent the great unwashed from swimming ashore with knives between their teeth to terrorize the blameless middle-on-upwards classes? Considering their mode of arrival, it may be necessary to rename ‘the great unwashed’ to ‘the great washed.’
Footnotes
- Read more at Slate.com: To save the city from rising seas, build more of it
