Off the far right edge of Earth.

I was born and raised in the USA. I'm a U.S. citizen. But I've taken to living in Italy. For almost half of the year. Because my Italian true love happens to live in Sardinia. Anyway, I've been overcome by a strange feeling. That the USA, that my longtime neighborhood on the shore of Forest Lake in Minnesota, is beginning to feel like the foreign country. Maybe it's that my neighborhood is full of ultra conservative Republicans that routinely elect Michele Bachman as our congresswoman. She's not only a Republican. But loony as loony can be. So very ultra conservative. As are so very many of my neighbors. And here I am. A liberal. A socialst at heart. And a communist sympathizer. I feel far more comfortable in Sardinia. Because I'm in daily touch with sane socialists and sane communists. So-called left-wingers. The city where I spend my autumns and winters has a palm-tree-lined main street called Via Gramsci. Yes, named after Antonio Gramsci, a communist persecuted by Mussolini in the 1930s. My favorite member of the Carbonia City Council, where I happen to live, is a young, energetic idealist. A communist. I love it. I love it. I love it. But don't get me wrong. I haven't written off my neighborhood in America. Because I have come to like living half of the year in a foreign land. America has become foreign. To me. That's where I am at the moment. And when I return to Italy this fall, I'll have come home again. To my new-found, comfortable paradise. Where I best fit. With my fellow liberals and socialists and communists and free-thinkers and romantic idealists. And I'll tell them, come visit me in America in the spring and summer. I'll show you a typical American neighborhood. Full of a mix of people. Including political, social and economic conservatives that seem to have fallen off the far right edge of Mother Earth. --Jim Broede