It's official, the US is becoming a police state

Yesterday I flew back home (mind you for 10 days for Thanksgiving). I started to get anxious at the Munich airport, going through the second security checkpoint. All flights to the USA are at the end of one terminal behind glass partitions, the only way to get to these gates is through the additional security. Like a fortress.

On the plane, even before the movie started, they showed a customs regulation video. Twice. All the goddamn forms, the consequences. It never used to be like this, the manufactured fear that comes with visiting the USA. The anxiety ramped on the plane, you could feel it. My seatmate was from Poland, I could only imagine that he was wondering if he would get tasered. (Blame it on Canada!) Standing in line for passport control, the agent was surly, no WELCOME HOME! Maybe that was Newark. :shrug:

Customs people were randomly selecting people waiting to take bags out if they had food or animal products. HA!! What a fucking joke, the US already has more diseases other countries put together. Would you like some salmonella spinach with your mad cow burger or listeria-laced chicken?

I truly fear for this country. Why anyone would want to visit is beyond me, the welcome mat has been permanently yanked.

We ARE there already.

it was bad before, but now it is amplified.

Is simply an exercise in telling the travelers who's in charge. A little humiliation to go with your tiny bag of whole wheat pretzels.

They tend to get a little overzealous about stuff there.

Very funny.

Their security makes the US TSA look like a bus stop.

Americans are probably the most incredibly whiney wusses on the planet.

Wahhh...I have to take off my shoes....wahhhh I have to go through a metal detector....wahhhhh I have to fill out paperwork to enter a sovereign nation...wahhhh the customs official who has to process twelve million pissed off people a day didn't smile at me. :eyes:

If we refuse to get used to it.

The Israelis are a special case.

Flying these days is a humiliating pain in the ass. I refuse to do it. And so help me God, if a republican takes the White House in 08, my girlfriend and I are leaving this country.

The possibility of restricting internal travel, by any conveyance, and restricting leaving the country, keeps Mikey Chertoff up all night with a Rockwell 11, blue steel, case-hardened and engraved hardon.

I don't know what scale you are using, but where i'm from that's pretty damn soft! I'd say it's more like Rockwell 58 (using the C scale).

"glass partitions"? that sounds so 1960s Cuba when people leaving the island were separated at the airport from their families by glass partitions--which the cubans called "the fish bowl" inside of which the same playing out of intimidation, passport checking, you can't go, and all that crap played out day after day after day.

too bad those in miami can't or won't see the similarities.

They were also incompitent but at least they didnt have the power to put me on the "serch 'em every time list" I have been on for 6 years.

Coming from Britain, though.

It may involve the individuals at each airport and their particular outlook. Sounds like the U.S. establishment in Germany and the airport in Newark are more fear-laden then those in Britain, and it could be better or worse depending on which airports you are coming from and going to.

Newark I might give a break because one of the 911 jets actually left there. There were a couple stories that made the Boston airport sound paranoid, but two of the jets took off from there. Anyone who works there on that date has to have felt the tension of being blamed in some way and even might have a crisis of self-confidence, at least as a group, that they might have failed in some way. (Not saying they did, but the media, etc., sure contributed to getting them to feel that way).

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=2315622&mesg_id=2315622
Democratic Underground - CBC: Windsor (Ont) ambulance carrying critical heart patient held up by US Customs

Different people will give you different examples, and cite major turning points throughout this country's history, but the police state measures really got a lot of mileage during the Reagan/Bush fascist regime of the 1980s ... it's that same sort of hokey 1950s propaganda, that when seen in hindsight, is so obviously geared for controlling the public mind via jingoism, machismo, patriotism, etc, and it's that same level of Large Print sloganeering that unfortunately still holds remarkable sway over certain personality types.

So for them, an unconstitutional, random {federalized} police "check" isn't anything to worry about, because Someone In Charge, or one of their media pundits, told them so...and more importantly, instructed them to actually hate those who do call it by its true name: fascism. Authoritarians, by nature of their pathology, admire a system of centralized power that can run roughshod over those pussy "liberals" and their endless "whining" about civil rights.

Or when the Kennedys and MLK were murdered?

I guess you haven't been tortured yet :rofl: