This is why I don’t follow the regular news: it pisses me off to find out the nonsense that’s being perpetrated against us. Just spotted an item on USA Today accidentally, which talks about how the departments of State and Homeland Security just announced that by 2008, all US citizens will need a passport to enter back into the country from visiting Canada, Mexico, Panama, Bermuda and the Caribbean. Goodbye free and unprotected borders. Hello Lockdown America.

The reason this frustrates me so is that it’s pretty much inevitable after this that one will need documentation to travel within America. Don’t believe me? They’ve already begun restricting who can do what with the no-fly lists. Think they’re going to just stop there? Ha. Double ha.

This is one of those news articles that, to me, seems to have come straight from The Bureau of Propaganda. It’s just brimming with bullshit. Let me highlight a few delicious morsels:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in an interview with the Associated Press, said the United States has to take every precaution to screen out “people who want to come to hurt us.”

This comes just after a paragraph about how Canadians will need passports to cross the border. As if those crazy Canadians are coming down here becuase they want to come and hurt us. I mean, this is the preposterous kind of bullshit way assholes talk down to kids, and even THEY can see right through it.

Here’s the next paragraph:

Border agents must look at scores of different state driver’s licenses and try to determine if they are real or fake. With passports as the main form of identification, “it’s going to take a lot of the mystery out” of the process, said the State Department’s Maura Harty.

Mystery? Mystery? What are they, Sherlock Holmes? This is what these people do. It’s what they’re trained for. It’s not a fucking mystery. You want to know how mysterious my last border crossing was? We came back down from Toronto and the dude squinted at our licenses for half a second, asked us how hot it was in Farenheit, laughed and waved us through.

One of my favorite quotes comes a little later:

Some U.S. citizens, Canadians and Mexicans will be able to use other government travel documents that require a background check.

Oh goody! They’ll give us the opportunity to use government documents that require a background check! What a fucking privilege! We’re so blessed!

Then they immediately say that the only problems anybody seems to have with this new system is that it will be expensive to get passports. OH! That’s the only problem. How stupid of me for looking beyond my own materialist obsessions at the larger patterns of governmental and cultural noose-tightening that this represents. The greatest part is that the person they quote as it being a problem for is someone who lives in El Paso and goes to Mexico to visit family. Without saying so, they get to say a bunch of things all at once: (1) That this will help keep dirty Mexicans out of the US; (2) That this will only be a problem for poor people; (3) These Mexicans wouldn’t be so poor if they didn’t have such big dirty families.

Shortly after that, they jump into a thing about how “Some business travelers said the new rules won’t affect them.” Business travellers…. hm, what does that mean… white people with money! People who are pumping time and money into keeping the system afloat, rather than having big families - these people, the loyal corporate slaves won’t be allowed. In fact, THEY are the ones who we’re protecting with all these new rules after all, right?