The following commentary, titled: “Is America’s Fate Sealed?” was written by author Carol Brown. Everything Harvey saw as nascent trends back in the 60’s has come to fruition. And realizing that many readers may not believe in the devil, per se, doesn’t change the fact that these portents have achieved fruition. Whether the causality is the adversary, other nefarious evil or injurious sources, or merely the result of wanton and hedonistic human nature, the culmination of these destructive trends in society has ripened dramatically in recent years.

Some benighted souls may interpret the dissolution of our most fundamental institutions, the defloration of our cultural mores, the rejection and denunciation of God, and the abandonment of standards of decency as “progress.” But to any with even a modicum of conscience, ethical grounding, or even objectivity in assessing our social viability from a historical perspective, we’ve not evolved as a society; we’ve devolved. Not unlike previous great cultures before us.

As intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has summarized, “What was once stigmatized as deviant behavior is now tolerated and even sanctioned; what was once regarded as abnormal has been normalized...As deviancy is normalized, so what was once normal becomes deviant. The kind of family that has been regarded for centuries as natural and moral – the ‘bourgeois’ family as it is invidiously called – is now seen as pathological.”

Alas, where do we go from here? Do we continue to plunge to new depths of degeneracy as a society, or do we rise as a phoenix, reversing our downward spiral to nihilism? The answer lies in each of us, individually and collectively, and whether we, by honest introspection and appraisal, acknowledge our own failures and shortcomings, and determine to do better.