Blue Water Bridge traffic--On Canada side heading towards U.S.--photo by Jim Steinhart -- 2011
The Port Huron Times Herald has given part of the story on our Blue Water Bridge international traffic.
More Canadian car traffic has come to do business with us these past 2
months than they did in the same months a year ago. The best such U.S. bound car traffic since
2002. Good News! But a quick web search reveals that total car
and truck traffic {both East & West directions} hit its record
height--6,138,850--in 1991. Total
traffic counts the most, as indicator of U.S. / Canada trade and tourism. Our truck export trips to Canada certainly need
inclusion. Total traffic was close to
breaking the 6 million mark again in the year 2000, but since 911 it has
decreased almost every year, planing off at about 5.12 million last year.
he headline in the Times Herald article was “Busier
Border.” It’s interesting to note that
the projected MDOT traffic {from a 1998 study} would put us at 10,179,932 for this year 2012. Instead we can’t reach even the 1991 high
mark. Important to consider is how the
past decade has been spent in creating a “bunkered border.” Have we all forgotten the two hour waits to
make the crossing, the stories of family travelers made to lie prostrate
handcuffed by cadres of heavily armed border guards? Have we not seen the fleet of brand new
border patrol vehicles parked in Marysville, and sometimes making the rounds up
and down the river? The millions of dollars high tech camera towers planted from Detroit to Port Huron, trying to do
what the “mooned balloon” cameras couldn’t consistently do?
Billions
have been dedicated to beef up a Department of Homeland Security. Yet in the
more than ten years since 911, not one terrorist incident apprehended at our
borders, north or south. Why couldn’t
this kind of money be spent to provide the infrastructure, education, and new
clean energy sources, for trade and commerce to prosper in our part of the
world? To paraphrase past Republican
President Eisenhower—someday the people are going to want peaceful enterprise
so bad that the government is going to have to get out of the way and let them
have it.
o quote the Trappist monk Thomas Merton: “The
root of all war is fear: not so much the fear men have of one another as
the fear they have of everything.
… They cannot trust anything because
they have ceased to believe in God.” Let
us take to heart the words from God that resound through all of scripture--be not afraid. If we don’t respond to this real life challenge,
we’ll continue to dwindle, hemmed in by our vast array of homeland security.
Illuminations by Kathy Brahney
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