I skimmed through the letters to the editor (July 16) and marveled at the seamless and unbroken display of leftist sentiment and thought as letter followed letter.

Without reference to any one particular letter or issue, what struck me about the collection was how absolutely foreign it all felt to me as a conservative American. These writers and I share completely different dreams and visions for our common country. I shudder when I think where we’re headed under the present regime; they rejoice. They feel inches away from Utopia; I feel at the edge of a deep precipice.

The late 1850s saw our country, with reference to slavery, exhausted from failed compromises, arcanely written Supreme Court decisions and desperate political gamesmanship. North and South looked across an unbridgeable chasm; they had one more election to hold in the shadow of the dying old order, one which had pretended we could be two kinds of country: slave-holding and free.

In 2012, Right and Left look at each other across a similarly unbridgeable chasm, ready to hold an election in the shadow of the last century’s dying old order. For too long, we, too, pretended we could be two kinds of country: capitalist and socialist, free market and state-controlled, libertarian and highly regulated.

I want something other than chaos to emerge from the victory of either side, but what is at stake in this election isn’t merely power and policy, but heartfelt dreams and visions.

The time for compromise has ended.

Lenny Hoy, Greenwood