Lots more not getting along is happening. You can count on not seeing many Canadians any more, and we won't be seeing you in all those old familiar places. As of Monday, you could get into Canada with basically no id, we usually took people's word at the border that they were Americans and coming over for a beer or to see Niagara from our side, or just to visit for a weekend. Maybe to come to my city to see the world's oldest continually in use baseball park. No more. No one allowed into the US without a passport. We Canadians can still visit Mexico, Jamaica, and all former British Commonwealth countries via the library card, but not the US.

You have to have a passport to go home. We have to have one to visit. Given that 70 plus percent of Americans don't have one, well you have to stay home. You can't ever leave your country if you don't have one, because your government won't let you.

Bush and Clinton were in Toronto yesterday for a conference / chat. Both were incredulous that the American government has put that rule in place, though it was a policy that was put in place during the Bush administration. They both vowed to go home and try and change it. This is not going to hurt us so much, but it used to be about 1/2 million Canadians a week dropped in for shopping/coffee or just to visit. Won't be happening now. We have more people with passports but between the National Guard, dogs, scanners, rfid scanners, medical isotope scanners, dirty bomb scanners, xrays, and detaining one in 10 arrivals to be interrogated like criminals it's pretty much over for the casual shopper/gas buyer, or just some of my friends getting a cheaper turkey twice a year.

The last time on the bus 3 customs agents dressed like swat team members with a gun drawn went down the aisle in our Shriner's bus and took the meat out of our sandwiches to dump in your landfill saying that importing any meat to the US was a health and security issue. Poor 80 year old Jimmy in front of me lost his baloney. Major issue that. Then they picked out our 2 black members and took them inside for a closer look. One was Pakistani and the other from British Guiana, both Canadian citizens, at least they had passports.

A friend who has a cottage on an island north of Detroit says it's routine to see drones and a Black Hawk chopper drop down and peer at his boat. He's a half mile inside the border on the water with his cottage. Gun boats too.

I had a captain once who was very paranoid.. when he got to being crazy we'd say to him..."it's ok to be paranoid, but are you paranoid enough?" He'd leave work sick most of the time when he got like that and we pushed him, but we got tired of getting out of the sack on a 14 hour night shift to wash the floor in case the actual chief might drop in on a surprise inspection and find a fuzz ball on the apparatus floor.

He died at 55 of a booze and tranquilizer overdose.

As to visits to the US the wife and I decided that if we are going for a week, maybe. No more day trips, 3 hours to cross the border is nuts. Of course now that you need a passport and we have passports (going to the UK next year), if we hear the wait is 3 minutes because everyone else quit we might drop in for a chicken dinner in Port Huron. We used to go 10 times a year.

Last year we cancelled the trip to the Michigan drum corps show...too much waiting, one car never made across at all, one guy who's 80 forgot his ID.

Big time threat he was, he's blind. We were dropping him off for free health care....LOL

John Conley
Musica est vita