Unless we take deliberate steps to avoid contact with the news of the day we cannot avoid the thought of the dire possibility of losing our American way of life. Consider the current issue of immigration with all its possible consequences. Possibilities that range from the generosity of sharing our vast resources and wealth with others who do not have access to such largess to the possibility of diluting and potentially losing not just our material wealth but a way of life that is a product of that unique democratic American experiment. 

One can see in these extremes an opportunity to love and a selfishness born of a fear of losing something dear. Proponents of either side can argue as to love’s true meaning verses the result of a loss of a way of life that has produced so much.

In the March issue of First Things author Mark Helprin warns of modernism and its potential to destroy from within as well.

“In the life of the United States thus far, we have had a great though imperfect and, in historical perspective, brief respite from tyranny, oppression, and “ignorant armies clash[ing] by night.” Powerful forces from within and without have often been and are now poised to end this. The fundamental inhumanity, regimentation, mechanisms of control and conformity, and ceaseless reductionism inherent in modernism are the fertile seedbed of political tyranny, loss of human dignity, ideological madness, and genocide of the born and unborn. In the triumph and worship of the modern and its unprecedented riches is much ugliness and danger.”