President Trump tweeting atrocious statements is no surprise. Over his campaign and his presidency, the shock effect has simply worn off for a lot of us weary Americans.

However, on October 17, Trump tweeted a video of the border wall prototypes that so many bigots demanded for a year ago while Trump campaigned. As he declared he would make Mexico pay for the wall, reasonable Americans rolled their eyes knowing that Trump is a liar.

As I watched the video of massive concrete blocks being placed with cranes stretching 30 feet high in the sky, I couldn't help but think that we were warned of this nearly 30 years ago by Nadine Gordimer in the short story "Once Upon A Time."

The story begins with a man, a woman and a child — a loving family, really. They live in the suburbs with a hired housemaid and gardener.

"For when they began to live happily ever after they were warned, by that wise old witch, the husband's mother, not to take on anyone off the street. They were inscribed in a medical benefit society, their pet dog was licensed, they were insured against fire, flood damage and theft, and subscribed to the local Neighborhood Watch, which supplied them with a plaque for their gates lettered YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED over the silhouette of a would-be intruder. He was masked; it could not be said if he was black or white, and therefore proved the property owner was no racist."

The house couldn't be insured against riot damage. There were riots outside of the suburb but only the people of color who were deemed as safe were allowed to enter the neighborhood.

But there was a robbery in the suburb and so their neighbors installed an alarm system. So the family did the same and added bars to the windows for extra protection.

The whole neighborhood had alarms that would screech throughout the suburb, triggered by cats, mice and flies, until no one was even surprised by the blasting of the alarms.

Soon burglars began cutting the bars away and no one paid attention to the alarms they triggered.

Eventually, they began to make the son play inside because it was more secure. Anyone could simply climb over the wall or the gate and into the garden.

They decided to build the wall higher.

"When the man and wife and little boy took the pet dog for its walk 'round the neighborhood streets they no longer paused to admire this show of roses or that perfect lawn; these were hidden behind an array of different varieties of security fences, walls and devices."

"The man, wife, little boy and dog passed a remarkable choice: there was the low-cost option of pieces of broken glass embedded in cement along the top of walls, there were iron grilles ending in lance-points, there were attempts at reconciling the aesthetics of prison architecture with the Spanish Villa style (spikes painted pink) and with the plaster urns of neoclassical facades (12-inch pikes finned like zigzags of lightning and painted pure white)."

Then they came across a wall so grand and so evil.

"Placed the length of walls, it consisted of a continuous coil of stiff and shining metal serrated into jagged blades, so that there would be no way of climbing over it and no way through its tunnel without getting entangled in its fangs. There would be no way out, only a struggle getting bloodier and bloodier, a deeper and sharper hooking and tearing of flesh."

The next day, the man and the wife had the razor blade coil installed on their walls.

That evening the mother read a fairy tale story to her son as he fell asleep. The next day he decided to pretend to be the prince that faces the thorn bushes to save the sleeping beauty.

He placed a ladder against the wall.

"The shining coiled tunnel was just wide enough for his little body to creep in, and with the first fixing of its razor-teeth in his knees and hands and head he screamed and struggled deeper into its tangle. The trusted housemaid and the itinerant gardener, whose "day" it was, came running, the first to see and to scream with him, and the itinerant gardener tore his hands trying to get at the little boy. Then the man and his wife burst wildly into the garden and for some reason (the cat, probably) the alarm set up wailing against the screams while the bleeding mass of the little boy was hacked out of the security coil with saws, wire-cutters, choppers, and they carried it, the man, the wife, the hysterical trusted housemaid and the weeping gardener into the house."

The End.

We are so quick to build the wall, but have we considered that it may be getting out of hand?