© The Associated Press / Toby TalbotA driver hands his passport to a border agent at the Canada / U.S. border crossing in Highgate Springs, Vt., Monday, June 1, 2009.
A decade after 9/11, tightened security measures have divided communities on the northern border, where for centuries, people crossed back and forth to shop, work or visit relatives. Where the Green Mountains of Vermont begin to give way to the broad plains of Quebec's St. Lawrence valley, residents acknowledge the need for enhanced security, yet many are frustrated. Most agree life will never be as it was, but they're adapting.
"It used to be real simple. We just went across the border. Sometimes I wouldn't even take my wallet," said Paul Martin, 59, the fire chief in Richford, a Vermont town of about 1,300 near the border.
Now, Martin said, he crosses the border two or three times a week to see his girlfriend in Quebec. He never knows how difficult it will be to come back, an uncertainty that illustrates the disruption of a small-town way of life that had pervaded even across international lines.
"If I get somebody I went to school with, I don't have a problem," he said. "If you get somebody new, they have to inspect everything. It all depends on what kind of a day the inspector is having."
Comment: Unlike Schnall, we don't read anything "powerful" in Bush's sharing of his "feelings". Why? Not only because his personality traits can be found in Hare's psychopathy checklist, but also because for all the years of his presidency - and all his life - his actions and words showed a being deplete of real human feelings:
from waging illegal wars in sovereign countries and sending Americans to their deaths, to sanctioning torture, to poisoning Americans through tap water, to backing Big Pharma in drugging children with mind-altering drugs, to intentionally spreading terror in the hearts of the American populace, to mocking those who feel self-pity, to putting African women's lives in danger, to funding the genital mutilation of African men, to being an accomplice in the greatest terror attack in the country he was elected to protect. He might try to "sound" humane and hide behind a mask of sanity, but his actions will always speak of themselves to reveal his true nature.
Read also,
"A Legacy of Greatness": the Morality of a Psychopath
Textbook descriptions of George Bush reveal psychopathy, and much worse
Bush is a Psychopath