Today marks the one-year anniversary of the day in 2009, October 15, a Thursday, when we got on a plane to leave the United States.

We have not been back since.

Its seems odd, gone from the U.S. for a full year … but it doesn’t. Given where we work (for The National in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates), zipping back to the U.S. or, more specifically, Southern California, is not a simple thing. It involves long flights, a complete body-clock disruption (unless it’s daylight savings; then it’s only 11 hours upside down, instead of 12), imposing on someone to take us in or incur housing bills …

So we have gone an entire year without going home, a first for both of us. The up side of that? It means no calamity befell our loved ones back in SoCal, not one so dire as to necessitate our return. We are happy and thankful for that.

We also were able to ameliorate the disconnect with family by coaxing several relatives people to meet us in Europe. Leah’s parents and her cousin. My daughters. These meetings were greatly beneficial to our state of mind. The advent of Skype also has been an aid.

A full year later, the U.S. seems far more exotic, from half a world away.

Frankly, it seems a contentious, nervous, unhappy place. Political partisanship seems even more intense, and I wasn’t sure that was possible. Too many people — good workers, loyal employees — fear for their jobs every day, a corrosive emotional burden. Too many other people have no jobs, or merely part-time jobs, and no real hopes of landing full-time employ. Many of them are former journalism colleagues.

Our home state, California, seems sunk in an economic morass, and we can hardly anticipate an escape. Even if we were ready to go home, what would we go home to? Unemployment in California is hovering at 12 percent, a number that goes even higher for our age demographic — and when the number of people no longer even trying to get work are taken into account, the statistics are alarming.

From a distance, California looks old and tattered. Broken. Rotting out. With a crumbling infrastructure and powerless politicians who promise much but apparently have no power to deliver much of anything because of the state’s vast expenditures. A particular drain appears to be government-employed workers. Only fools or paupers work in California’s private sector, yet they are expected to support those in the public sector who have higher salaries and far better benefits. Clearly, it is not a viable economic model.

One of my daughters is getting a masters degree in public policy. I have suggested she pose a question to her fellow public-policy students at USC: Devise a plan in which California can leverage its few remaining assets — climate and nature at the head of the list, with agriculture, perhaps followed by the UC system — into prosperity. It happened a century ago. What must be done to bring it back?

Does that mean a tourism-based economy? Does that require blowing up the current system, in which it costs the state more to run its prisons than its schools? California can be made to work again; no one, however, seems to know how that will happen, and certainly not when it will.

Nationally, we see a strained economy, with a few bright spots.

What seems most apparent, after a year in economic exile, is the desperate need for a Eisenhower Era-style attention to infrastructure. After seeing and using bright and gleaming new facilities in places most Americans still consider global backwaters, a person comes to appreciate the need for new and improved roads, bridges, railways, ports and airports, and clean private vehicles. I have written before here that an outsider from Hong Kong or the UAE or western Europe would be appalled at the state of LAX — and that dilapidated airport is often a foreigner’s introduction to California and the U.S.

And if rebuilding infrastructure means cutting back on the defense budget and getting along with a few less aircraft-carrier groups and foreign military commitments … so be it.

Military expenditures bankrupted nearly every empire that came before the American … and will do the same to this one if they are not reined in soon. Spending money on the military is a dead-end economic activity. It produces no products, no services, nothing to sell or admire or eat or drink. Meanwhile, America can remain militarily secure inside its borders at a fraction of what the current defensive budget is. Maybe we don’t need a carrier group on station in all the world’s oceans.

We would like to come back. We have no idea when we will be able to.  An older businessman whose analytical abilities we respect, recently said he doesn’t expect California to be economically vibrant for at least 10 years. He is anything but a gloomy guy. But he is a careful and intelligent observer, and we don’t doubt his analytical abilities.

We are grateful for our opportunities to work in our chosen fields and be adequately compensated. Even if it means being 11,000 miles from home.

We anticipate a brief return to California in the coming year, for a wedding.  But staying? That could be far in the future, and we must acknowledge that. “Home” probably will not be home for quite some time, which is a bit of a melancholy admission.