I'm a tour director.

I'm in DC, and New York and Boston a lot, and I do tours in Canada and the rest of the world, too. The past two weeks I've been on the road non-stop, primarily in New York and DC.

I've spent a majority of the time going through security checkpoints. At every attraction our bags are checked, we go through body scanners, we take off our shoes, our coats. You know the drill. Today alone I've been through six scanners. There are policemen everywhere. Eleven years after 9/11, I'm led to believe that terrorists are going to attack the bull on Wall Street?

Today we were touring Wall Street and you can't even walk up to the bull anymore and rub him for good luck. It's cordoned off and a policeman sits there all day in his police car two feet away to make sure no one hops the fence and touches the bull. Seriously? Even the bull----? Has someone made a terrorist threat against the bull? We've been walking by that bull on tour for a dozen years, but alas, it's been off limits for months now. It looks ridiculous behind its steel fences, like a bull in a zoo.

DC isn't any better----it's worse... and the truth is, there is no terrorist hiding behind the Jefferson Memorial or the Wall Street bull. TPTB are hoping to make life more difficult, more restricted. All under the guise of terrorism.

It takes hours to get in and see the new 9/11 memorial fountains. It takes hours to see the Statue of Liberty. It takes hours to see the Capitol, hours to see the archives, hours to get through security just about everywhere. It's the new normal. No one questions it. Most people think they are just doing their patriotic duty.

Out on the road so much, I really have a sense of what is happening to this country and how it plays out in everyday life.

So.....I'd love all of the people who are waiting for the aliens or the White Dragons or the Pentagon to come and save us to let me know when this might happen. Because everyday it gets worse and worse out here.

Everyday we look a little less like America and more like Amerika.

No problems out here in West Texas. People seem to do what they want, when they want.

I've been pulled over a couple times here and the cops are reasonable and fair when they could have really nailed me (may just be because I'm white though).


My advice: Get out of places like DC, NY, LA, SF, etc.

I'm a tour director.

Change careers if it's that big of a deal to you. Saying America is a police state is ridiculous and insulting to anyone who has ever had to live in such a horrible situation.

Sounds about right. 9/11 almost cuts my life in half. I've lived just about as long before 9/11 as I have after. (Still alive. lol Weird wording right?) I remember America before all this security came into being. It has spread to all sectors of society. My grades was one of the last to graduate with some semblance or normalcy, yet. We had overzealous rules, and no-child-left-behind, but nobody enforced them unless you were the "bad" kids. I remember getting detention only one time and it was because I was late one too many days my senior year. My only time ever getting detention, my computer lab teacher came in to supervise us and he came right over to me asking what I did. He instantly let me leave and told me to go see my hot girlfriend for him. lol Now, I doubt anyone is allowed to think for themselves. My school now has a strict dress code, good bye individuality, and the school is run like a prison. No one is allowed in the halls, ever. Only between periods are three minutes in the hall allowed. In 9th, you can't leave unless you have a signed pass from a teacher, where all I had to do was ask my homeroom teacher to leave and he was the one who decided if we were responsible enough. The football games are totally neutered as well. Cops patrol the area now. Pathetic, especially since we are a low crime area and a fairly affluent sleepy rurally-ish area. We aren't DC or Baltimore or Atlanta, ok. lol It seems only natural for "paranoia" of the state to invade our schools since our schools are the machines of indoctrinating children into the system.

It is becoming more of a police state everyday.

Had you blamed it on Obama..dumb and dumber would have agreed with you.

Peace

Maybe has something to do with the occupy movements, one place they were messing with was Wall Street. I know that the bull was not guarded a year ago because my brother took a picture with it.