jbarter wrote:From what I've seen on some other threads I got the impression that some of you colonials considered leaving your home state was going abroad.
I can still remember the amazement I felt a few years ago when watching an amercan TV show. The main character (in her mid to late thirties) had left her home somewhere in the mid-states and moved to California. The first thing she did was to go look at the sea because she'd never seen it before in her life. Believe me, living on our little island that is really hard to get your head round.
In terms of distance traveled, for residents of most states (excepting New England, where the scale more nearly matches the European model) leaving your home state IS like going abroad.
There are
counties in some of the western states larger than some of the smaller European countries.
On the other hand, in most of the US, structures built 100 years ago are old, while structures 200 years old are ANCIENT. This is more noticable the further west you go, but even in the original 13 colonies older-but-still-in-use buildings are rarer than seems to be the case in Europe.
My immediate family isn't much affected by the change - I travel on business and my wife's family is in Hong Kong. Even when they weren't required, we used our passports when visiting Mexico and Canada just because they *did* seem to speed things up for us.
But I'd bet good money that my youngest brother and his family have never had passports (as far as I know, my brother hasn't been out of the US since a family visit to Canada when he was about 4). I'd guess that, on average, people in the US are both more and less travelled than Europeans - more, in that I seem to recall reading that statistically Americans move more times, and further, during their lifetime than Europeans do. And less, in that for most Americans, foreign travel, even to "nearby" countries like Canada and Mexico, requires much more time and money than it does for Europeans; though a trip from Kansas to Florida or California is further than a trip from London to Rome or Istanbul, it still isn't "foreign travel."
Overall, better border security is a good idea - though it's possible to debate causes and and justifications, we (as a country) do have enemies who have vowed to destroy us.
I *do* wonder why they aren't doing something about the ~1 million who cross the US-Mexico border illegally each year, though. Until that's dealt with, requiring passports at the legal border crossing points reminds me of the tollbooth-on-the-open-range scene in _Blazing Saddles_.
