Yes, this is a rant.
image by AI; my own prompt
Travel by Canadians to the US is down almost 50% from last year’s already drastically reduced levels. Part of this is a quiet Canadian protest against US imperialist foreign policy — Trump’s arrogant assumption that Canadians wouldn’t find the idea of being a US state repulsive, his threats of annexation, his endless tariff wars against former US allies, and the US Uniparty’s financial, political, and military support for Israel’s genocides and the Empire’s brutal, illegal, endless wars, while so many Americans are suffering poverty, precarity, joblessness, and illness that the government refuses to pay a penny to relieve.
But the larger part of our reticence to travel to the US, I think, is fear. It is increasingly obvious that the collapse of the ‘rule of law’ in the US, and the declaration by government officials that they are ‘above the law’, and that their ICE and other paramilitary forces are exempt from prosecution for their terrorism and excesses, means that it is absolutely dangerous for non-citizens to venture across the border.
Just as one example: There are 58 Canadians being held, mostly indefinitely, without being convicted of anything, and often without charges, in conditions described by visitors as “inhumane”, in privately-run ICE concentration camps in the US. And that’s just the number the US government is admitting to.
You’d have to be insane to knowingly risk your health, freedom and life just to travel to a country whose political, social and economic systems are chaotic and collapsing, and rife with massive corruption, lawlessness, psychosis, and violence — most of it perpetrated by its Epstein Class patriciate caste that owns and controls everything there, including the government, the judiciary and the prison systems.
And anyone following the political events there knows that even if the Tweedledee Democrats replace the Tweedledum Republicans in the next elections, the policies and situation there aren’t going to significantly change. The US Empire has entered a death spiral, and it’s only going to get worse.
Trump and his Republican and Democratic corporate-owned cronies don’t have to build a wall on the Canadian border to keep people from going to the US. We’re voluntarily staying away, here in a country that, while far from perfect, at least (most of the time) offers its citizens a safe and dignified life.
