World View:

All things considered, 2009 has been a pretty good year for yours truly. It’s brought highs and lows but enough blessings to count, for which I’m thankful.

I am filing this column Wednesday, a day ahead of my usual deadline. As I write I’m eagerly anticipating joining some friends in Los Angeles for a Thanksgiving Day supper. Thankfully, we’ll be sharing some home-cooked Moroccan fare instead of the traditionally bland holiday turkey dinner.

So, if you’ll bear with me as you’re still digesting your festive meal, here I’d like to take stock of my year.

For me, 2009 began on a rocky note. I was canned as part of a workforce downsizing at the Riverside Press-Enterprise, where I’d worked as a schools beat reporter for four years. The layoff thrust me onto California’s unemployment rolls. I was stuck there for six seemingly endless months. At least, there still was enough cash left in the state’s coffers then to keep me and countless other Californians subsisting “on the dole,” as they say in my native England.

Then, as I was about to quit journalism outright — with not even a glimmer of a glimmer of hope on the horizon — a totally unexpected but welcome break came my way in mid-September: the opportunity to take on my first editing gig in a 15-year career, as the Daily Pilot’s new city editor. I’m so thankful to be working again, and in a challenging new job and a managerial role that I’m enjoying, serving the paper’s readers in Newport-Mesa. The salary is nothing to write home about, but it’s a job that delivers a fortnightly paycheck.

Yet California’s economic picture remains bleak. In October, the state unemployment rate hit 12.5%. And the nation’s economy is supposed to be on the rebound? When I sit down to Thanksgiving dinner, I’ll be thinking of a guy I met the other day, a lunch counter neighbor of mine named Matt. This fellow Californian was an unemployed corporate pilot who grew up in Newport Beach, where his dad still lives. Matt said he used to fly executive jets and charter flights out of John Wayne Airport, before joining another crew based out of Van Nuys. When we met two months ago, he told me that he had been laid off a year earlier and that he was still looking to be re-employed.

I had no idea that pilots could be caught up in economic downturns too. I was under the mistaken impression that there was a national shortage of qualified and trained pilots. My Thanksgiving hope is that Matt is flying again in a new job, and that he still gets to drive airplanes for a living.

Waving little flags

Apart from a new job, my personal highlight of 2009 was becoming an American. On April 22, I joined about 4,000 immigrants taking the oath of citizenship en masse at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds in Pomona. We were herded into a vast building, which normally was used to exhibit blue-ribbon steers and other prize livestock at county fairs.

To my right sat a Polish woman, and next to her a South Korean couple, who were there to take the oath together. I’m not the sentimental type. I don’t gush about patriotism and I don’t like to wave flags. But, I admit, the momentousness of the occasion made it hard not to get choked up. This sea of people had gathered in this space from all of the globe’s four quadrants. They had spent years journeying there because of one idea: they all wanted to become Americans.

For me, becoming a citizen was not an easy decision because I was — and remain — a critic of U.S. foreign policy. I also hesitated because I knew that, by becoming a naturalized citizen, I’d have to renounce my allegiance as a national of three other countries: Britain, France and Sri Lanka. I was afraid that by becoming just another Yank, I’d erase my international-ness.

But it was a fellow global citizen, President Barack Obama, who inspired me to apply for citizenship. As I mentioned in the first installment of “World View,” the president and I have much in common, such as spending part of our boyhoods in Indonesia, though separately.

I decided to become a citizen because I wanted to have the right to vote. Had I been naturalized before last November’s election, I would have voted for Obama. I’ll register as a Democrat and vote for his re-election in 2012. However, that won’t stop me from grilling Obama in the columns and editorials that I craft for this paper.

I was thinking of the 44th president as I sat among those thousands of immigrants assembled in Pomona. Yet, as soon as the federal judge from Los Angeles had sworn us in as citizens, the rebel in me couldn’t resist my first act of dissent as an American. When I and the 3,999 other new Americans were instructed to wave the pocket-sized Stars and Stripes that had been handed to us as we entered the building, I fought back the reflex to wave my little flag, as the room erupted into a flurry of red, white and blue.

I was relishing my newfound and inalienable American right of self-expression, a right that too often is trampled upon in other countries. And, for that, I’m most thankful.

City Editor IMRAN VITTACHI may be reached at [email protected] or at (714) 966-4633.