No Americans Allowed

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March, no one was allowed to enter the European Union, or EU, and few if any people in one European Union country were permitted to enter another.  But starting today, nationals from fifteen nations can enter the 27 member states of the EU for non-essential travel.

Thanks to the way it's botched its own pandemic response, however, the United States is not one of them.

As an American who has never set foot in a single European country, has seen college classmates travel to London before he ever left his own time zone, began planning a trip to Italy with my mother before 9/11, began planning another trip to Italy with my mother just before getting laid off, saved cash in a tin container for a European trip before having to save it in the bank for something else, began planning a trip to Paris least year before having a health crisis, and spent the past thirty years looking forward to seeing the Eiffel Tower, seeing the Vatican, seeing the Tivoli Gardens, going to Volkswagen's Autostadt museum, and riding a bullet train to any of these places, I . . . well, I think you know where this is going.

I'm ready to give up.  After traveling to eighteen states and the District of Columbia (or whatever the hell they call that place these days), I decided there was not much else I wanted to see in America, which doesn't say much for the remaining thirty-two states (that includes Texas), and having visited two Canadian provinces, my mother and I were eager to go to the Old Country.   I don't need to tell you again what happened - my first tale of my frustrations, from 2014, is available here - but, suffice to say, Murphy's Law has hung over my European travel hopes for a good twenty years.  The EU's decision to ban Americans from its member states is all but a death blow to my already slim chances.

It's understandable.  The United States, already the nation with the largest number of cases - 2.6 million - and more than 126,000 deaths - and so no Frenchman or German worth their salt would allow a Yank to set foot in their countries and reinfect them or their fellow citizens.  Donald Trump has utterly failed to contain the COVID-19 virus even as European countries like Italy - one of the worst-hit countries in this pandemic - have flattened their curves and gotten their caseloads down to a manageable level.  It's not like we're the laughing stock of the world now - heck, we've always been, because we're such a clownish people - but now the Europeans are no longer holding in their laughter out of politeness.  Some of them even pity us now.

So what are my plans?  Nothing, for the immediate future. For the far future - that is, for the time after the pandemic ends - I don't know, because I simply don't know when the pandemic is going to end.  Nor do I know what my financial or personal situation will be.  I could set a date, but I've tried doing that before.  And by the way, I know that this embarrassing travel ban isn't going to hurt Trump with his base.  No one who supports Trump would bother going to Europe because they think America is the greatest country in the world.  Even though they likely never traveled anywhere outside the U.S. to allow them to make that conclusion.  But I have to confess . . . EU countries are pursuing the same policies and restrictions to combat COVID-19 that are similar to what smart states like New York and New Jersey are doing, and so even if I could go to Europe now, I probably wouldn't have a good time anyway.

I'm just ticked off that once again, I had hoped to travel abroad some time in the near future, like maybe next year, and . . .

Yeah, well, Abraham Lincoln hoped to visit Jerusalem after the end of his second presidential term.  But John Wilkes Booth had other ideas.