Get to the immigration officer, answer questions, get a cold stare a few times looking at me and my passport, unpleasantly asked why do I have two passports (I'm a dual citizen), told I don't look Swedish (of course, I'm naturalised), get told to wait, they leave to get someone else to check something, two immigration officers start shuffling my passport, wait while no one talks to me or acknowledge I'm there, passport stamped and I get told to "move".
Get my bags, and out of the terminal, on the walk through the terminal there's another 15-20 officers with rifles strutting around, get out of the terminal and there are two massive armoured cars from NYPD parked up front, more cops looking a bit tough.
It's an overwhelming presence of "security" everywhere, signs plastered with messages about how illegal stuff will be punished (littering, leaving your bags unattended, smoking, every message seems to say something about "under penalty of the law").
I think if you live with that all the time it's easy to filter out the noise but there's an eery feeling of oppression all around, like a boot is just waiting the right moment to stomp on you.
Very immigration officer I’ve ever interacted with has been chilly, it’s not some uniquely American thing.
Pretty much every rail station I went through in Europe had extremely (to my eyes) heavily armed guards standing around. I was also asked to present my passport on several occasions. At one Italian station, it happed twice within a few minutes. I’ve been on multiple trains where some flavor of police comes on, checks people’s papers, and then grab some guy and escort him off at the next stop.
It's very hard to express in text the feeling of oppression, it's not about just armed security, it's the attitude of those, it's the attitude of the people representing the State, it feels much more adversarial in the USA than anywhere I've been in Europe.
Also, it's not about being asked to present a passport but presenting a legitimate passport and being met with "you don't look Swedish".
Perhaps you are just too accustomed to the feeling of the USA, as an outsider it does feel different, and way more oppressive.
Seems normal to me.
If you think it's normal to call people "gutter trash" I guess you're too far gone in some bullshit and should do some soul-searching to come back to your humanity.
But really it’s only like that at borders. Just watch the videos of all the foreigners loving on the USA and tearing up when they had to go back to their countries after the World Cup.
Every bad thing in the US is a caricature of what caricatures were 50 years ago.
From my PoV, it seems odd someone would value someone else’s truck more than their own life!
Can you clarify?
My point is that that is a very sensible bumper sticker, because it only applies if someone thinks they want to steal the truck, clearly valuing their life less than the truck, proving the sticker’s point.
It’s a common sticker. People who are shot in a robbery (or their kin if they don’t survive) commonly claim “why would the victim who defended themselves value their stuff more than the thief’s life” without failing to consider the thief themselves valued their own life less than the stuff they were attempting to steal.
It’s a common sentiment in free places, those who values abiding citizens more than law breaking citizens.
Most free places value human life higher than stuff.
Like this:
https://x.com/libs_ofchicago/status/2099992150532337702?s=46
You should look into positive freedom vs negative freedom for a starter.