What if There is a Wall and Americans Can’t Get Out?

 

Last night, after stoking-up on political news, I surfed the local cable channel offerings for a science-fiction or slasher movie that would bring me back to reality.

I landed on a scene with Dennis Quaid in front of computer screens with a couple of guys around him staring at what appear to be radar and satellite images of a hurricane.   Quaid is telling his guys that we’ve got some freaky weather going on.

Quaid in character and parka!

The film is The Day After Tomorrow, and Quaid plays a climate change expert who, though having previously written a scientific paper predicting the New Ice Age in 100 years, is now predicting it will happen in about two weeks.  

Naturally, storms rage, tornadoes all but level cities across the U.S., giant tsunamis flood New York City, temperatures drop and everything comes to a grinding, frozen halt.

Tornadoes rip through the country before the big freeze!

Quaid then briefs the president and tells him that everyone’s got to go South to Mexico.  Yes, the entire country.   

And then there are shots of the mass exodus of Americans wading through the Rio Grande to Mexico with suitcases on their heads.   Panicked Americans are streaming south across the border, not in droves, but in the millions.  

Americans head across the border

So naturally I start thinking: “How would they get out if there was a Wall?”

It would be unlikely that a Mexican person would be headed North across the border during a New Ice Age, unless of course it was to take a job abandoned by an American fleeing to Mexico.

So with a big Wall, it's a trap if you need to escape an Ice Age in America and head South to safety in Mexico.

Trapped!

Aside from providing some impressive special effects, I'm afraid that this movie did nothing for me other than provide an allegory about the U.S. presidential election.   

The New Ice Age? 

Whatever prognostication the pundits (in some cases of pulchritude) and punters are making about Donald Trump, the scenario of this film seems entirely prescient.  And I must admit, it seemed like the dose of reality I was looking for.

Trumpped!

So would this play out to be: “President Trump, tear down this Wall!” so Americans can get out of the freezer?    

"Seriously, Hell has frozen over, Mr. President.   Sorry it happened just days after you took office and put up the Wall in record time, but already the entire country is a wreck, and millions of Americans are stuck at the Wall trying to escape and survive this New Ice Age."

In negotiation!

Trump: “I’m the President.  The wall is not coming down.  I'm negotiating a very good deal to lease the new glaciers.  We should have a deal the day after tomorrow.”