On Jan. 16 of this year, I wrote about many of the joys I experienced in my recent trip to St. Petersburg, . It is a magnificent city, particularly if you enjoy history, as there are multiple palaces for each and every famous person that ever passed through.

I have war videos showing "Leningrad," the former name of St. Petersburg, although how it got the name is not fully understood, as Lenin hated the place and moved the capital back to Moscow . In my videos, the street trams are shown "back on the tracks" in 1943, following the lifting of the World War II siege, and the street trams today are the same ones from the video. You get aboard and a woman conductor walks over and sells you a paper ticket. I was back in 1910.

The buildings rebuilt after the war were built to match the existing czarist architecture, and they give the city a wonderful feeling of "ancient ."

Economically, however, St. Petersburg is distressingly modern, or at least wants to be. As an American, I was universally made to feel welcome, and the people were cordial and curious.

Americans, however, are far more welcome than American money or current thinking, and it was those trends that hit me right in the pit of my stomach. Having studied Russian history, and in spite of their missiles and Olympic successes, it's generally viewed as a backward nation. 

Yet they view , today, as a backward nation. And that's where it hurt. The American dollar is totally to be avoided, and it is in free-fall as it is in many other places. In the space of four days, I exchanged $300 twice. On the second try, the value of the dollar had dropped 10 percent. In four days.

The pubs and the clubs are cosmopolitan, with people from many parts of Europe, but the refrain is the same, and again, it hurts: "What has happened to ?"; "Has America lost its way?"; "What has become of your mighty economy?"

I didn't have the strength to even venture an answer. Had the questions been posed by a professor at the London School of Economics or some noteworthy political think-tank, I might have written them off as hypothetical questions.

This was coming from just plain folks, some from "modern industrial places" and some from places we consider "backward."

Yet they consider us "backward" now, and it's not propaganda. It's just people asking the tough questions. Well, maybe the questions were not tough, but any attempt at an answer would have been.

Over the years, I've seen enough anti-American content on TV to know that it exists – flag burnings at the time of the Iranian hostage crisis; protests in Europe and elsewhere; unpleasantness in the Balkans and the Middle East . 

This was different. It was idle banter, but it was in my face and it hurt. I hope somehow, this year's events will put us on a path that will put an end to these kinds of questions, because I'm just not comfortable when, in the metaphor, our flag is burned right in front of me.

It's been six weeks, but it still hurts, and I can still hear the questions.