By Ben Slote

Recently my mother overheard two elderly women talking in a post office in Michigan, where my folks live. “They’re making a world we don’t fit into anymore,” one said to the other. The line struck such a chord for my mom, who is 79, that she quoted it over the phone to me three days later.

I was reminded of the line — and the chord — when reading Bob Habel’s heartfelt column in the Tribune last week. Mr. Habel, under the enormous headline, “We are afraid,” described the ways in which he and his wife are terrified that the America they know and love “is being taken away right before our very eyes.” Given these times and the sincerity of Mr. Habel’s essay, my guess is that many readers nodded in agreement. You don’t have to be old to be worried. I’m “just” 50, but I share in that general unnerving sense of dislocation in the world — from the rapidity of change on all sorts of fronts, and from the unforeseeable yet long-lasting consequences of other people’s decisions, inventions and actions.

When I asked my mother, a forward-looking and flexible person, how she felt she didn’t “fit” into the world anymore, she talked about cell phones and texting (“all that social isolation”) and how impolite people have become, including in the U.S. Congress. She could have talked about the dissolution of newspapers across the country and the threat to community and an informed electorate that loss represents; or the brutal effects of a global economy on the lives of Americans (she’s in Michigan, after all); or the melting ice-caps; or terrorism and war.

These days there’s plenty to worry about. But let’s do ourselves the favor of confining our worry to things that are true.

Mr. Habel recounts that not too long ago we were a country characterized by great military and economic success. Leading the Allies over the Axis powers in World War II, standing up to communism, and forging a manufacturing economy second to none all demonstrate what the “Greatest Generation” could accomplish with a government that stayed out of its way. He acknowledges the bumps in the road, such as the violence of the KKK and the shootings at Kent State, yet even these sad episodes underscore for Mr. Habel what was right with our country: when government responded to these problems — in ending racial segregation, for example — it was merely to restore “domestic tranquility.” He concedes that social change is inevitable, but now, in his view, a much more alarming change is taking place in America. “People,” he says, “we are losing our freedoms.”

There are at least two problems with this formulation. One is the assumption that the federal government has, until recently, kept its hand out of the country’s economic and social business. Nearly every president of the 20th century, for example, put his hand in pretty deeply. Which is why my parents and the Habels have Social Security and Medicare, why there’s an Environmental Protection Agency, a minimum wage, FDIC, and hundreds of other regulations, programs and laws that address some of the unintended consequences of free enterprise. One can lament this “meddling,” but our citizenry, through the Greatest Generation and beyond, has a very long history of accommodating it — and electing it.

The other inaccuracy at work in Mr. Habel’s essay is the idea that recent interventions in the auto industry and banking, along with current proposals for health care reform, constitute the usurpation of “our freedoms.” What freedoms, precisely? Again, there’s a legitimate argument to be made about the fairness or effectiveness of these interventions — consider Bank of America’s buyout of Merrill Lynch, guaranteeing giant bonuses for the very executives who drove the brokerage firm into bankruptcy, and the SEC’s blessing of the arrangement. But to call these interventions “government takeovers” and to see them as the stirrings of “socialism” and a prelude to dictatorship, as Mr. Habel does, seems like the worst sort of racing to wrong conclusions.

The conclusions are wrong because they are not based on facts. And the conclusions are bad because their proliferation further undermines a new version of the national unity Mr. Habel so fondly remembers.

In his heartfelt candor, Mr. Habel is instructively accurate about one thing, though: the difficulty many are having adjusting to dramatic changes in the U.S. population. By 2050, the U.S. Census Bureau projects that non-Hispanic whites will be a minority in this country. If we as a country ever hope to build more “Great Generations” and the sense of national unity that the phrase evokes, we will need to start by coming to terms with who that “we” fully is, not just the so-called “real America” of small towns that Sarah Palin celebrated last year but the real America that is everywhere around us, in Meadville and everywhere else.

Who knows if we’ll get there. I worry about how many of us feel compelled to predict, sometimes very loudly, the end of our democracy. Maybe this is a false concern, too. In the 1930s, Herbert Hoover declared that the New Deal was founded on the “principles of fascism.” And there’s a beautiful memorial in our nation’s capital commemorating FDR, principally for his response to the Great Depression.

Slote is a resident of Meadville.