Letters to the Editor
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this is about the draft
The draft is coming back. Homeland Security doesn't want U.S. citizens escaping to Canada as easily as they did during Vietnam. All we need is one more terrorist attack, which, considering our overbearing foreign policy, is not hard to imagine. Everything is getting in place for immediate police state/draft for the military while the fear, and subsequent complicity, runs high.
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@radioguy
It's not actually illegal for Americans to travel to Cuba. The law says that we aren't allowed to spend any money there. If they discovered that you had visited Cuba, you would have been fined. They cannot revoke your passport for that offense, nor, I believe, for any offense (unless they can revoke your citizenship, which is far more difficult).
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@MacK.
I read that lot of scientific conferences are being held in Canada because it is so much easier for international scientists to travel there. There have even been instances where scientists were denied visas for conferences because of unidentified issues with homeland security. I've also read that many people from other nations avoid even flying through the U.S., since any landing in the U.S. subject them to the mercies of homeland security and they are afraid and angry that they have to undergo invasive procedures.
Personally, "homeland" sounds way too much like "fatherland" for my comfort.
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It's not just Canada
I'd like to echo MacK. The attitude of the DHS is damaging America.
I know that it is common for EU citizens to avoid travelling to, or through, America because of all the hassle they encounter from rude and aggressive American officials. You don't get this in other 'western' countries; when, for example, entering Australia or New Zealand as a non-resident, the process can be long but is efficient and polite.
A New Zealand friend of mine occasionally travels to the Yukon to visit her son and in the US has to endure the DHS nightmare even though she's just getting off one plane and on to another. To her great relief there is now a direct flight from New Zealand to Vancouver - one more person avoiding the US at all costs.
It's tempting to see this as symptomatic of a general coarsening of American attitudes to the rest of the world; an attempt to bolt the doors and bar the windows to keep out undesirables while the US withdraws into itself. This can't be the way to go.
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US government makes me sick.
As a Canadian I have to admit that the actions of the American state make me sicker by the minute. It is the state not the people that make me so sick. My American friends seem to be OK, so do other Americans that I meet in the airports, on the road, in Canada and abroad. But somebody elects those SOBs to power and lets them do their smelly work. I wonder who does that and for what reason.
And those border guards - they are the worst. Always impolite, always aggressive, always treating me like a potential criminal. Even before the 911.
I remember in 1980, when my Polish passport got stolen while I was travelling in Canada as a student, I approached US consulate in Toronto to issue me a new visa, because I had a return flight to Poland from NYC. They took my application, they took my money and then silence followed for days. No sympathy, no understanding, no mercy for a young boy from a far away country stuck in Toronto and unable to go home. While at the same time my countrymen were doing the dirty work of dismantling the communist system, what certainly benefited the US. And no preferential treatment in spite of the help during the American Revolution by Kosciuszko and Pulaski. I wonder if those two countrymen of mine should have served with the British instead.
Yeah, there is a problem here.
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Lovely!
The US Department of Homeland Hilarity uses Draconian measures to ensure that Americans are discomfitted as they visit a close neighbor's city and return. Meanwhile, the US border with Mexico is as porous as a screen-door with thousands of illegals swimming over, slithering in and sneaking through virtually unchecked.
What the f*ck is wrong with this picture?
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RE:Next on the Agenda of Homeland Security
The Bush Administration could not care less about Canada or anywhere else for that matter. Its foreign policy and moron diplomacy really sucks. Besides immigration these new set of moronic regulations are meant to stop Americans from buying cheaper perscription medications in Canada or Mexico,thus assisting the Drug Baron Corporations at their price gouging in America. Its one of the reason I live in Vietnam now. You can buy things like Ventolin for asthma for 5 bucks here whereas in America its $75.00.
But I would not surprised if Homeland Security will next require all of us to have a National Idenity Card(with an RF ID so we can be tracked) and permission to reside in different cities. Just two weeks ago a women was forced to remove nipple piercings at the airport(these items are not on the phohibited items list)in public by those morons at TSA.
Our rights are slowly being stripped from us. Maybe its time more of us engage in Domestic Terrorism against the government and take our country back from these neo-nazis's
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RFID chips and you
It is true that these chips can be read by anyone with a reader. It is also true that encasing the chip in aluminum foil will disrupt the signal.
As far as the RealID goes, I will refuse to carry this, or any other form of ID, with me at all times. They can go ahead and fuck themselves, that is not America as far as I am concerned.
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A sane word...
"But Canadians are not swimming across Lake Erie to escape socialized medicine and sane mortgage-lending laws." How nice to be grokked!
P.S. - As many people have said, you're only inconvenienced crossing the border legitimately. There are miles of unprotected (and unprotectable) miles of border thru prairie and mountain available for those who are up to no good...
PPS - My daughter, a long-time resident and tax-payer of the U.S., can't get citizenship and her husband can't work, and annually they have to submit to a gruelling enter-the-U.S. ritual. They're looking forward to moving a few miles back to, yes, socialized medicine...and an annoying but essentially peaceful government (except for that trying-to-please-the-U.S. thing that has us into Gaffanistan. We declined an invitation to participate in Iraq.)
PPPS - No hassle moving around in Europe. Many of its young people are working for a few years here, a few years there, learning multiple languages, becoming citizens of a new way of managing things. Yes, it's a different scene, a cozy smaller area, unburdened any longer with imperialist "responsibilities"...but a model for a U.S. future ...