When I first stepped off an obscure, terrible, bargain-airline plane, full of weird (and smelly) hippie-type folks, at JFK in August 1972, America was still experiencing the spasms of the 1960s, a decade of mass race riots erupting all over the country, augmented by the deafening ugly crisis of the Vietnam War that threatened the very stability of the federal government and drove angry-shouting hundreds of thousands onto the streets to demand “stop the war now.”