How could I not wish you well? You gave me, an americano from the Latino South, this language of love that I return to you. You gave me the hot summer afternoons of my childhood in Queens, when my starkest choice was whether to buy a popsicle from the Good Humor Man or the fat driver of the Bungalow Bar truck. And then back to calculating Jackie Robinson's batting average. How could I not wish you well? You gave me refuge when I was barely a toddler, my family fleeing the fascist thugs in Argentina in the mid-1940s. One of you then. Still one of you now. How could I not wish you well? Years later, again it was to America I came with my own family, an exile from the Chile of Pinochet you helped to spawn into existence on precisely an eleventh of September, another Tuesday of doom. And yet, still wishing you well, America: You offered me the freedom to speak out that I did not have in Santiago, you gave me the opportunity to write and teach, you gave me a gringa granddaughter, how could I not love the house she lives in?

Where is that America of mine? Where is that other America? Where is the America of as I would not be a slave so would I not be a master, the America of this land is our land this land was meant for you and me, the America of all men, and all women, every one of us on this ravaged, glorious earth of ours, all of us, created equal? Created equal: one baby in Afghanistan or Iraq as sacred as one baby in Minneapolis. Where is my America? The America that taught me tolerance of every race and every religion, that filled me with pioneer energy, that is generous to a fault when catastrophes strike?

So was I wrong?

When I hoped you would rise to the challenge as death visited you from the sky? When I believed America the just, the rebellious, the unselfish, was still alive? Not entirely spoiled by excessive wealth? With the courage to conquer its fear?

America learning the lesson of Vietnam.

Vietnam. More, many more than 3,000 dead. More, many more, than two cities bombed. More, more, more than one day of terror.

And yet, they do not hate you, America.

The enduring lesson of Vietnam. Not next time: Obliterate the enemy. Not next time: Satanize those who disagree.

What the Vietnamese are whispering to you: They remember and yet they do not hate. Not that easy, America, to forgive the pain. Or can you forget your own September 11 that easily?

Not that easy, America.

To grow.

Or was I wrong? Have I become contaminated myself with your innocence, lived too long among you? Do you need 50,000 body bags coming home before you start to listen to your own voices of peace and dissent?

Am I wrong to believe that the country that gave the world jazz and Faulkner and Eleanor Roosevelt will be able to look at itself in the cracked mirror of history and join the rest of humanity, not as a city on a separate hill but as one more city in the shining valleys of sorrow and uncertainty and hope where we all dwell?

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