Half empty or half full

I think of the things I miss, and things I don’t. I think of the United States, and I miss her greatly. I’ll be back in 6 weeks, and back to work I go, to the building of dream homes. We left on December 16th and have been eating, drinking, and occasionally speaking French, we have been welcomed in a great country. There are funny similarities and odd differences between these two cousins. She watched mildly amused and optimistic as we grew, and she helped us on occasion, and we her. She has suffered the same growing pains, interestingly enough one in the same country of Vietnam. She has been misunderstood, just as we have by the communities around the world. Our greatest light has always been our beacon, her greatest gift to us. She is perceived as a people who dislike Americans, and are rude to our tourists, that is absolute balderdash, her people are the warmest giving people on the face of the planet. We walk into any store in France and say “Bon Jour” and have always been greeted with a smile. The second it comes out of our mouth, we are instantly pegged as outlanders, but outlanders trying, and I say it over and over, if you try they will open their arms to you, they will fall over each other to help in any way possible. It’s obvious why some of our administrations have painted them as anti-American, pushing an agenda, simple separation-ism politics. If your not for us you’re agin us mentality. The same thing we’ve done to Iran, we have friends that travel there every couple of years, they are greeted as gentle giants, as they loom over most Iranians. But there has never been an unkind word to them, and believe me they can spot an American in a crowd.
Yesterday it snowed, the day before it was 56 degrees out. When we drove from Antibes to Bordeaux it was like driving through small versions of Oklahoma, Wyoming, New Hampshire, then central California. It was bizarre, the similarities are funny. I think my biggest reservation will be coming back to American T.V., and the nightly news. The repetitive news cycle of tragedy based breaking news is horrible. It’s as though the National Enquirer was picking lead stories. Although to be truthful, I don’t watch a lot of French T.V., its worse than ours. I don’t have an answer, so I should shut the you know what up, but it is depressing to feel anxiety on coming back to the states because of the state of hate in our politics, and that’s something that everyone see‘s. If we can’t win, then you can’t win.