Passports

Look at a map sometime and find Point Roberts. Imagine a community that relies on a foreign nation for just about everything, including visiting other locations within their home nations. Imagine that after years of having loose regulations to live in such a community, we develop serious and sudden increases in regulations. That is Point Roberts. In all honesty, I have never so much as set foot in Point Roberts, so I’m not going to focus on them for the rant.

After the tragedy of 9/11 and the tragedy of the media’s coverage of 9/11, the federal government decided to make life more inconvenient in an attempt to increase control of the public. Despite numerous indications that changing passport requirement wouldn’t have done any good, the government decided to do just that.

Before the over-reaction to the terrorists, Vancouver, BC was awarded the Winter Olympics. Expecting some of the event’s world travellers to spend some time and money in our state, we invested a lot of money ourselves. The passport requirements were put into place shortly before the games began. The value of our investments were greatly deteriorated, and our country was essentially telling us, “Screw you!” Okay, maybe that’s not quite true. I believe the word in front of “you” was only four letters.

Years later, we have still not seen any evidence that the passport requirement has done one bit of good. All we know is that we are being inconvenienced to visit our neighbors by our oppressors. At the very least, can’t they move the checkpoints further south? I would much rather have Canadians walking among us than Calivermin, Bwostonians, and the crap that New York is made of.