Welcome to America

To mothers in Japan, Mexico and the USA: happy Mother's Day and long may you remain happy.

I am increasingly in despair of the nastiness that seems to have infected the USA, a country I have come to know well after 40 years of living or travelling there, and for which I have an enduring affection. I was going to write a short account of two incidents related to me by an acquaintance, but I found them so disturbing that I decided that it would not be safe to say too much, for fear somebody might be identified in the future. If I am neurotic, so be it.

My acquaintance recently entered the USA for a confernece of the sort I attended for decades without ever being asked even why I was attending the meeting. Now it seems, one is questioned about why one wants to attend such a conference, why one might have lived in foreign (demicratic) countries (allies of the USA) and so on.

More disturbing still was the experience of a 60-year-old non-US national, a former officer in his country's military, with a somewhat disabled leg. For no apparent reason, this man was strip searched at security as he was about to catch a flight home. Among other indignities his testicles were held by an agent who instructed him to cough. Nothing was found.

I was frequently "patted down" at security because I did not want to be electronicaly scanned (I was free to choose) and the agent would always carefully explain how he was going to pat me down, including touching my buttocks but with the back of his hands. The procedure was courteous an even slightly amusing. Strip searches are another matter.

I was also told of a speech in which the speaker decried men in skirts and the woke to standing applause.

I am sufficiently appalled that I would consider very hard whether to travel to the USA for the next four years. But then, given my opinions perhaps I would not be allowed in.