"If you go dark, the world goes dark."

Friedman points his column at an important question that's been on my mind for awhile. Of the changes in the face we present to the world since 9/11, perhaps the most dangerous are the ones we don't notice, because they are happening piecemeal, and only indirectly affect Americans.

Friedman does a good job of combining the way historical changes can lead to unexpected consequences decades later, the symbolic messages we're sending inadvertently, the current effects of some of our new policies, and getting to the big question. I'm not sure a national commission is a useful approach, but he's right that the need to think about this is urgent.

In New Delhi, the Indian writer Gurcharan Das remarked to me that with each visit to the U.S. lately, he has been forced by border officials to explain why he is coming to America. They "make you feel so unwanted now," said Mr. Das. America was a country "that was always reinventing itself," he added, because it was a country that always welcomed "all kinds of oddballs" and had "this wonderful spirit of openness." American openness has always been an inspiration for the whole world, he concluded. "If you go dark, the world goes dark."