And yet, despite the election cycle, despite the opioid crisis, despite the tax bill, despite yawning inequality, I still see good in this country.

For one thing, I’ve heard it all before; when it comes to confronting anti-Americanism, I’m a veteran. Anytime I work in Gaza or the West Bank, and must explain why the Trump administration is cutting funding to refugees. Every time I work with a Syrian refugee and must explain why we have a travel ban against Muslims. Over a decade ago, I climbed the stairs to my Baghdad hotel room thinking, how can I ever go home and live in a country that is so dedicated to occupation and regime change?

But there were other moments. I was walking down Rue de Rivoli in Paris on Sept. 11, 2001, when my phone rang. “Someone just flew a plane through the twin towers,” a friend told me. The pain and despair I felt in the following days was matched by the private and public sympathy I felt from thousands of Parisians.

When I served as the jury president for the prize for war reporting given in Bayeux, the first city to be liberated during the Battle of Normandy, the mayor showed me the expanse of American graves at the nearby military cemetery as a way of demonstrating what America meant to him, his family and his people.

As a liberal and human rights activist, I am cognizant of the dark times we live in. But I try to remember that generally, and where it counts, we usually do it right. The First Amendment. The New Deal. The Four Freedoms. The Marshall Plan. The opportunity and social mobility that is more possible than in any other country where I have lived.

Without getting into Norman Rockwell platitudes, I see a determined pragmatism, a freshness that comes from growing up in America that only someone who spent years away from it can notice. As the mother of a child in the French educational system, I was aware of how positive reinforcement and encouragement is frowned on in Europe. “Oh you Americans, always saying, ‘Good boy!’” one of my son’s teachers once told me. “We don’t believe in doing that.”

In France, only the very bright can enter programs to prepare them for the graduate schools that act as iron gateways to the elite. In America, we draw our political and economic leadership from everywhere. Yes, there are loans. But there are also chances.