The time I didn’t “feel” America.
Didn’t stand for the anthem.
Or see pride in the flag.
That was back in the 1960s.
During Vietnam and fire hoses down South. Belligerence abroad; inequality at home.
As for freedoms here, I took those for granted.
America exceptional? A beacon on earth?
Hardly.
Especially for places unlike it.
Places of repression, hatred and war.
Although I traveled as a journalist, it began to change me as an American.
First, in the mid-1980s, there was Ethiopia.
I was there to write about famine, a seemingly neutral subject politically, but it was a communist dictatorship. So they assigned me a government minder to monitor me. Before I left, he made sure I got my film stamped at the Ministry of Censorship. There really was such a thing.