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.”
