One night a freight train thundered by with so much noise and power that I tossed out what I thought was an unanswerable question: what would it take to stop something like that instantaneously? I imagined some kind of massive wall, but the answer was more obvious: another train going just as fast the opposite way. America could seem like that as well, a country moving so fast and with so much weight that only a head-on collision with itself could stop it.

Reading around Junger a bit, I came across this passage from another of his books, Freedom,that struck me,