So Michelle Obama, who stopped by Rhode Island yesterday, is in a bit of trouble.

She made the mistake of saying: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country, because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.”

People are in a tizzy over it. There has been a competitive frenzy among talk show hosts and others claiming they have always been proud of America. Why, they ask, hasn’t she? Wasn’t she proud of our triumph over communism, our defeat of the Taliban, our aid to tsunami victims?

I’m the first to agree she could have phrased it better.

But this whole frenzy of people proclaiming their superior pride makes me wonder.

I don’t doubt their love of country.

But I’d argue that to really get America in your gut — to deeply value it — you have to spend time in places that lack the things making us unique.

That’s what I want to talk about today.

If you’re prone toward criticizing Michelle Obama’s statement, I’ll give you one better:

In my teens, I outright looked down on America. It was the 1960s, I was protesting a war, and I saw us as a belligerent nation. I took our freedoms for granted. I saw the flag with mixed feelings.

Then, as a journalist in my 30s, I began to travel.

My first stop was Ethiopia, where I went to write about famine. It was a controlled communist state, and the first thing they did was assign me a government “minder.” It happened in many African countries. Governments like to control journalists. Even non-government people do. In the Sudan, I typed up a story and asked the Telex operator at my hotel — this was 1984, before the Internet — to help me send it home. He read it and refused. He said it was too critical of the government. It was all a lesson in how the First Amendment is an extraordinary thing on this earth.

You might ask why I didn’t pick up a phone and dictate that story. Because they often listen in. Just as important, back then, phones in Africa almost never worked. One of my nicest moments that month was picking up a phone when I landed at LaGuardia and hearing a dial tone. It literally made me proud of America. You may think that’s a small reason, but in truth, most countries don’t know how to deliver basic services, from food to phones. Ours does.

In 1987, I traveled to Beirut to write about the war there between Muslims and Christians. Americans were being kidnapped by Hezbollah. It was an early glimpse of the terrorist threat that’s now a global problem. One of my biggest challenges was sneaking to the Muslim side of Beirut to report, because it was controlled by militias. The government there was weak and overwhelmed – a common problem around the world. It’s why rebels today often terrorize parts of nations and why Osama bin Laden can hide in a lawless stretch of Pakistan.

In my Muslim Beirut hotel I met a British journalist named John McCarthy who, like me, was soon to be married. The day we both decided to leave, he was kidnapped and held in chains for five years. The Lebanese government was powerless to find and free him — just as the government of Colombia can’t free kidnap victims there today. Weak governments and deep grievances make destabilized nations common on this earth. But not America.

I went to Northern Ireland, where I found they’ve had to build walls between the Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods. People there told me Americans don’t know how lucky we are to have such coexistence among so many faiths and backgrounds. I appreciate it now.

I’m remembering the month I spent in communist Europe as it was collapsing. I’d once romanticized communism as a system of equality. It’s not. My time in Russia, Czechoslovakia and East Germany showed me it’s a failed, tyrannical system that sucked away people’s spirits and utterly failed to deliver prosperity.

A final memory: In Romania, the last Stalinist state in 1989, I was followed from my hotel by secret police who arrested me when I tried to take a cab to the block where a known dissident lived. They took my notes, grilled me for two hours and put me on the next flight out of the country. There was no chance to ask for a lawyer or even a rep from the U.S. embassy. You don’t appreciate due process until you don’t have it.

I’ve no doubt the talk show hosts and others piling on Michelle Obama are sincere when they say they are proud of America.

I’m sure they are.

But most don’t begin to understand just how exceptional this nation is on earth.

mpatinkin@projo.com