NEWS: America Is A Country Full Of Cry Babies

POLITICS: America Is A Country Full Of Cry Babies

Beginning in January, the government began to require passports for travel to and from Canada, Mexico, Bermuda and the Caribbean. Applications for passports skyrocketed, which caused major delays for people who applied for passports. Over the past few weeks hundreds of people have lined up at passport offices across the nation, hoping to get their hands on overdue passports. Apparently, it has been horrifying experience for many who want to vacation.

Son of a bitch! This really makes me angry. People are losing out on vacations! What the fuck is the government doing, trying to make our country safer? Assholes!

It is not like this January deadline snuck up on anyone. It was reported ad nauseam in newspapers and on news channels for months before the deadline arrived. But that apparently wasn’t enough for our society full of Paris Hiltons. Nope, we need our vacations and we need them now.

I was planning on a vacation to Ireland in August. Being incredibly lazy, I waited until April to apply for my passport. I knew about the deadline and when I applied, I knew I had fucked up and I would suffer the consequences. I am not going to Ireland because under current circumstances, I could not count on my passport arriving in time. That is how life works sometimes. You fuck up, you take responsibility and have to sit Leprechaun Island out.

Not in cry baby America. The new passport restrictions were dropped on Thursday due to all the tears from Americans who couldn’t take a cruise to Acapulco on a germ filled boat.

Now if you want to get to or come from Mexico or Canada all you have to do is show a driver’s license and proof that you have applied for a passport. Super. There are many things that we are forced to do in the name of safety that are completely retarded, such as putting all lotions and liquids into 3 ounce containers and then stuffing them in a tiny baggie. Idiotic. But having a passport to cross the border seems like the most basic first step to keep out any terrorist who may want to do us harm. (Not that I believe in the “terrorist” threat all that much) It is not much, but it is something and it is necessary.

I wonder how many of those people who didn’t get their passports and complained to their Congressman were mad that Paris Hilton got out of jail for a day? Fucking entitled brat.

Too bad the Patriot Act hasn't interfered with enough vacations.

I work with a bunch of "undocumented workers", some of whom are planning to go home in 6-8 months. They have all been going to Miami to get passports. Even they seem to have gotten the message, and some of them only speak Myan dialects or Portuguese.

i'm sorry, but pretty much everyone should have a passport by the time they are 18 or so. especially if your going to college. it's not that hard.

So, convenience is more important than the semblance of safety. Sounds like America might me getting back to business as usual. Sweet. I'll happily take an America where citizens take frivolous vacations over one where we need an ID to do anything.

Fuck off. I'm 32, been to college - never had one never needed one.

I love how you all completely overlook the fact that the government put the restriction in place without any thought of the infrastructure it might need to implement such a restriction.

YEAH !
Cause Georgia offers all of the culture and life experience anyone could possible ask for.
Why the hell would someone want to go anywhere else ?

Exactly. That's pretty much the point that seems to be missed by this news item.

bold tag: hilarity.

For the world's most powerful country, it's frightening that we have such a stronghold on the way other countries are run, but so few of our citizens have actually been to a different continent...

...or even want to go. I can understand if people can't afford it -- after all, we have one of the worst stratifications of rich & poor -- but people who aren't even curious, what the fuck is that?

Americans are simply ignorant about the rest of the world. And this is why end up falling for bullshit ideas like 'Saddam & Osama are best pals'.

I don't mean this personally, but the fact that so many Americans have no fucking clue about how the rest of the world lives drives me fucking insane.

It is completely inexcusable.

Where's have I heard this before....a policy without an actual plan....hmmm....?

whatever. just wait till I got shot in the head by some chick over money. I bet i'd want my passport then!

Whatever, I'd be fucking crying if I was out $4000. And if you wouldn't be, maybe you're the entitled brat.

i think the point here is that people knew for a long, long time that they were going to need passports to cross a border after a certain specific, well-publicized date.

if someone is out $4000 because they didn't have a passport, it isn't because the government fucked up, it's because they didn't have their own shit together in time.

Jesus people... getting a passport takes time. Especially when the rules are changing and everyone in the fucking country is trying to get one at once. Hmmmm... we knew it was coming, so apply far in advance. Stupid Twits.

It took me 5 months to get mine. Problem? NOOOOO... because I applied right after my last one expired and before I planned a trip.

Sucks the lady is out 4K. Not really her fault since the trip was a gift but maybe her husband should have known she does not have a passport and possibly planned a vacation that did not require one if there was not time to get one.

Leaving America takes a substantial investment of time and money. I would bet the amount of Americans who have traveled to another country would be similar to the amount of Europeans who have traveled outside of Europe. Because I somehow doubt that the average European is traveling to the middle east or even the far east, and absorbing their culture.

Two things to note here
1 Europe isn't a single, homogonized culture like the US (yet)
2 Even your rich, entitled pres didn't bother to get a passport, and he had plenty of oportunity to travel.

No, it's because the government put in place a new set of regulations, affecting millions of people (it may shock you to know that most Americans don't - or at least didn't - hold passports) without putting the personnel in place to facilitate the timely execution of it.

This woman put in her application in at the beginning of March. It will be mid-June before she gets her passport. That is 3 months. A ridiculous amount of time for a simple identification document.

It is FTR who is doing the whining here. I wonder how he would feel about loosing a 4,000 dollar gift, courtesy of the US bureaucracy.

I got my first (now expired) passport back in 1995 so I could travel to Japan over the summer with my high school. The trip was in June. I applied for the passport in early March and didn't get it until the end of June...

because the goverment has always advised individuals to allow at least 3 months to receive their passport. Because, get this secured documents that are only made in a couple places in the country are always going to take a lot of time, especially going in to peak travel season.

The fact that every travel agent, airline, and even Amtrak have had the warnings about this up on just about every page of their website and at the beginning of every phone recording for months now means that I have absolutely no sympathy for them at all.

I'm sure her husband was advised to have passports before he EVER bought the trip in the first place.

I feel it really necessary to point out something everyone has apparently missed: the United States can NOT pass laws that change border regulations for other countries. As a U.S. Custom's agent at the Canadian border, I don't even see people entering Canada unless they are trying to get a Temporary Import Bond cancelled, or are looking for a Vehicle Export form.

The point? This is a law that requires U.S. citizens to have a passport when entering territories of the United States or when RETURNING to their own country. That second part, by the by, is technically superseded by a portion of U.S. law that makes it illegal to deny a U.S. citizen access to thier country of citizenship.

Meanwhile, though already under discussion for change in at least Canadian Parliament, you can still enter both Canada and Mexico without a U.S. passport after January first. It is expected that the Canadians will be requiring passports from U.S. citizens sometime in the coming year, mostly due to pressure by U.S. Customs authorities.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, projections made by U.S. Customs and Border Protection show that this is likely to cost the U.S economy several billion dollars in tourism revenues.

I have to disagree. I'd bet that the number of Europeans who have been outside of Europe is probably 3-4 times higher than the number of Americans who have been outside North America.

I only have anecdotal evidence, and am too lazy to find numbers, but while traveling, I've found it rare to meet Europeans who haven't visited the US at least once.

Granted, part of this is due to a much much longer paid vacation time in Europe -- usually 3x more than we have in the US. And this is a cultural difference which, in the US, seems to create a vicious cycle: people in the US don't have much vacation time, so they don't take longer vacations, and so they don't get exposure to much of the rest of the world, so they don't express interest in longer vacations, and so they don't get much vacation time...

Still, a week in another country isn't outside the realm of possibility for many middle class people -- a dubious term, I know -- in the US.

I'll have to respectfully disagree with you about this, too. I've met several middle class Europeans, (and I'm talking people with stable careers and families), who have been to the Middle East (particularly Tunisia, Morocco, Turkey, Jordan) and Asia. Again, with longer vacations and with North Africa just a skip over the Mediterranean, it's less difficult.

But I think the main difference between the US and Europe is that of attitude and awareness. From coast-to-coast, our culture is incredibly homogeneous. And really, I suppose there's nothing wrong with that.

However, as citizens of the US, we have considerable power and influence about the rest of the world, and the fact that most of our foreign policy is guided by a voting public which knows very little about the countries they influence and affect, the more we continue to see the results of misguided, uninformed foreign policies: a lot of angry people in poor countries who resent us, and a lot of other countries building alliances to check our power (i.e., the EU, Mercosur, China/India, etc etc etc).

Any Europeans care to add their opinions to this?

It is amazing that you had to spell it out, but that was exactly the point.

Americans were told, over and over, that there would be long waits, that the organization was not in place for them to all wait until the last minute and guess what they did? Fucking babies.

Ummm, no. If you plan a trip in February and apply for an expedited passport for your departure in June, you have behaved perfectly reasonably. If the DoS can't manage to get you an expedited passport in four months, when they had three years to prepare, they fucked up.

I didn't know my travel plans for 2007 in 2004, the DoS did however know that they were going have to issue millions of new passports for people who didn't previously need them.

I'd be upset with my wife for tossing away 4 thousand dollars. If someone says to you, "this can't happen" and you do it anyway, you can't blame the person who warned you. It's called personal responsibility. I've already taken enough shit from my wife who is pissed we are not going to Ireland. But guess whose fault it is, as I said in the article. MINE. Grow up.