Last week I walked to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo to obtain a new passport for another 10 years. It is a great privilege and a heavy burden to carry this document of the country of my birth and place of my citizenship.
On the one hand, I have enormous freedom to move about the world with access to 174 countries and territories visa-free or on arrival. On the other hand, the world has a love/hate relationship with America, with which every American citizen is confronted when overseas.
The American abroad becomes the face of foreign and domestic policy. U.S. foreign policy is centered on war and the military; domestic policy is crime and guns. The dominant theme is violence, how much we engage in it or are entertained by it.
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