What most Americans know about foreign policy and life in other countries comes largely through war.  My mother, a Costa Rican by birth, has spent much of her existence fuming at America’s ignorance about other countries.  As a teen ager, I thought she was being un-American.  As

When I served in local politics,  I, and some of my predecessors, worked hard to shut down a local nursing home in the eastern corner of the county.  It was rickety and posed health hazards for the residents, but it had an antebellum grandeur and its patients, who had lived there ma