ABSTRACT
The end of the Cold War also thawed the ice sheet that covered deep value-system divides. In the past, the survivalist, separatist said, the military and other disciplined forces of society would absorb, reform and basically control these violent men left wandering in society. But, “the entire post-Cold War transformation has been botched. It may seem that there is no relationship whatsoever between the end of the Cold War, Oklahoma City, Chechnya, and Islamic fundamentalist violence. The end of the Cold War did relieve the world of the fear of a massive superpower conflagration, but it also “freed” the powers of human fears that had been frozen into complicity by regimentation. Once the Cold War was gone, the West’s leaders should have filled that yawning vacuum with new visions that could have relieved and absorbed the dangerously released energies and anxieties. Revive the quest to renew the American character in the post-Cold War world and the twenty-first century.
