Intellectually, I agree with you that our culture has farther to go if we're going to go all the way down that road. In fact, the public opinion polling company (http://erg.environics.net/) I work for has done a lot of social values research (http://www.michaeladams.ca/books/fire_ice/) that supports the argument that our values are different in enough ways that we're not likely to go that way under normal conditions.

But we're not necessarily living under normal conditions anymore. I acknowledge that it's more of a gut fear than a well-supported argument, but I'm still afraid that we'll take "shelter" in, or be imprisoned by, Fortress America.