Everyone’s got to settle down sometime

The date, May 1, was set in order to counter International Workers’ Day and was recognized by the U.S. Congress during the height of the Second Red Scare.

It’s so symbolic that Worker’s Day is taken to be an opposite of loyalty to the US.

I’ll be honest, I’m of similar age and if my partner went “does the man want his appy slices”, there is no way I won’t go “fuck yeah this man wants his appy slices”

I don’t know how to tell you, but dude, your country (and many others) is literally on fire every year. Even if we did something very drastic, like keep up the COVID lockdowns, Florida is going to be flooded. The United States will lose towns, villages, cities, territory it will never recover. The country will be full of climate refugees. It is like a war where you can’t shoot back. I don’t know how else to put it.

How long have you been trying to reform healthcare? And it’s still not getting better, is it? Only maybe “glacially”. Trump’s regressive changes weren’t glacial. He undid half a century of alliances and trust in years. Sure, vote Biden, but voting Biden is not a complete solution, it’s not even a band aid. It’s just the saner half of the US trying to hide from the next bullet.

So no, glacial change - “slowly but surely” - won’t cut it. We need radical change, right now, and maybe we will end up with something liveable in 25 years.

Depends I guess, it was by and large, but as I understand contemporary intra-US flights are much more fussy than intra-EU ones.

Airport security inside the EU varies, they will make you go through the detector gates and X-ray your baggage, but they don’t care much as long as you are not bringing weapons or something. Amsterdam Schiphol let me through with a half-empty 2 liter bottle without me noticing, the security on the back trip caught it. I’ve traveled a few times outside the EU, but it was also pretty automated, the only extra step was getting in a separate line if you had an EU passport, since they had NFC chips that would make checking them automatic.

Security in general mostly takes 10 minutes, if everything goes alright you can make your plane even if you get to the airport 30-40 minutes before departure. It does not go always alright, so I try to arrive 60-90 minutes early. Leaving the plane is no fuss, I usually get away with calling a taxi right as I deboard and I don’t stop anywhere getting out. I’ve flown planes without assigned seating as well, the pilots put the baggage in the hold themselves, it was kinda like a long distance bus.

You can’t wait at gates, that’s true.

That said, airport security changes are pretty down on the list if you count the implosion of the USSR, the Yugoslav war, Georgia, and a bunch of other stuff happening kinda near it. From this side of the Atlantic, it feels it was only a big historical event because it shattered a perceived “invincibility” of the US. It never really fought a modern war in this century or the last where it was actually risking something other than expeditionary troops, mostly thanks to geography.

Generational trauma from WWII is still a thing today, imagine the effects of historical events since, and it kinda puts it into perspective why a few thousand people being bombed on a distant shore has people maybe even more indifferent to it than people in the US are to events everywhere else.

I’d say that COVID is also more universal. 9/11 is only that important for people in the US.