When I was a child living on Westminster Avenue in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, my dad made an international journey to work each day, taking a bus, and later, driving his own car, either across the Ambassador Bridge or through the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel to downtown Detroit where he worked as an accountant. He did have a crossing card, and he did get to be known by the border officers on both sides as "one of the regulars." But the rest of us in his family were not regulars. We did not make the trip with Dad every day.
It was only a few times a year that Dad would take mom, my sisters and me, across the Detroit River into Michigan, especially after one of my older sisters married and she and her husband moved to a Detroit suburb. I remember how easy it was for Dad to get us across the border. Even later, when we moved to the same suburb where my sister lived, and he no longer was crossing each day, and so lost his status as "one of the regulars," it was still a simple process to cross the border.
For more nearly 200 years, the United States and Canada have maintained the world's longest friendly international border. Citizens of either country have never needed a passport to cross the border. "What country are you a citizen of?" the officer would ask, followed by "Do you have anything to declare?" And that was about it. In most cases, the procedure lasted less than thirty seconds.
All of that is soon to change. Because of what happened on September 11, 2001, Americans and Canadians, for the first time ever, will be required to have a passport to make the crossing at Detroit-Windsor, or at any other spot along the immense border that separates the two neighboring countries. In most cases, the procedure will still take only a few seconds. That won't change.
At the point where the Ambassador Bridge crosses the international boundary, a sign makes reference to the "peoples of like ideas and ideals" that inhabit the two countries. But this new requirement is a reminder that the world we live in now is a more dangerous place than the world I knew when I was a boy in Windsor.
My parents are now buried in a cemetery in Windsor. The last time I visited their graves, the answers to a couple of quick questions was all that was needed to cross the border.
However, because of the evil that resides in the hearts of people who live on the opposite side of the planet, people who do not share the like ideas and ideals of Americans and Canadians, the next time I visit their graves, I will have to carry a passport. That is not really a big deal, I suppose; passports are not that difficult to obtain. But an era is passing, an era when two peoples who share so much were granted easy access to each others nations. Now, perhaps, it will be just a little more difficult for Canadians and Americans to become "one of the regulars."
