Travels- Day One

I've arrived at Buffalo-Niagara Airport and boy, oh boy, what a culture shock. It's not even as overt as when I visited Bratislava years ago; no, it's more subtle than that and present in the small things. There are a sad number of buildings with shuttered windows whose walls are layered in chipped, peeling paint- I guess the downturn in the American economy has swept northwest of Detroit and touched Buffalo with its mortiferous scythe; trucks lay idle in industrial-workplace parking lots with cranes extended from the beds, poised and ready for work but frozen in the air (what are they waiting for?); and the foggy sky lent a sombre, funereal mood to the city. But on the bright side, I had the easiest and quickest border crossing in my entire life! No interrogation (surprising, considering the events in Boston yesterday) and the whole thing didn't take more than ten minutes thanks to the half dozen or so people on the bus.

As I'm blogging here at the airport, the TV is on in the background and hearing the news is making me feel edgy and uncomfortable. Maybe having watched Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine just a couple of days ago has affected my mindset (his movies tend to do that), but all this news chatter about the Boston Bombing is making me miss Canada a lot. My country is free, relaxed, and unworried about things like terrorism and bombings (for good reason, too, but far too numerous and complex to talk about here), and the States isn't like that at all. In Bowling for Columbine, Marilyn Manson, who's surprisingly intelligent and articulate, described America as a 'culture of fear and consumption' where its citizens are fed a constant stream of high-level fear that, in turn, causes them to consume violence and so the cycle goes. In Canada- even in Toronto, our biggest city and North America's fourth-largest- we just don't put that much importance on stuff like that. We don't. And when someone challenges us on that notion, we find it as absurd as being asked to grow a second nose.

For example, in only five minutes- five minutes!- of listening to this newscast, I've already heard four different people discuss the Boston Bombing and use terms like 'lone wolf homegrown terrorist' (and how they're the hardest to deal with because they're almost impossible to predict and deal with after) and 'biometrics' in scanning the marathon crowds to find suspects. One newswoman, talking to her partner in reference to the police having held a suspect that proved not to be connected, asked him, 'How do you think the police are going to deal with having someone in custody who isn't linked, and how are they going to move forward from here? What are they going to be looking for?'

I want to say that this culture of fear and consumption is a little ridiculous but when you're in the middle of it and TVs are blasting hyperbole at you from every direction, it's pretty hard not to be affected by it. Anderson Cooper just said, '[Boston] is not a city under siege. It's not a city at war. It's by no means broken- not now, not ever. We must all stand tall, stand proud, and stand together. Never let anyone with a bomb in a backpack stop us from finishing the race.' Ho. Lee. Cow. How do citizens live day-to-day without going insane from all this constant stress and pressure? I guess I take it a little- a lot- for granted that I just never have to deal with this stuff on a daily basis, but I feel for Americans that people in power and media are constantly feeding them such a gush of paranoia.

At least the airport has free wifi.