Differences were meant by God not to divide but to enrich.

J. H. Oldham, in Faith and Order

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I recall a story about the former Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill – a robust, friendly, people-loving, working class, Catholic Irishman from Cambridge, Massachusetts, right next to Boston.

The story is this: while Speaker, Tip attended a reception held on the Hill and met a man and asked him his name, to wit the fellow said, “Robert Redford.” Tip responded to the well-known actor at the height of his fame with this, “What do you do, Mr. Redford?”

Tip was so anchored in serving people at-large he didn’t know one celebrity from another.

In a piece in the February 27-28 Wall Street Journal, columnist and keen American observer Peggy Noonan identified “a terrible feature” in our nation today, and said of it this: ” … we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care much about their unprotected fellow citizens.  (Emphasis added.)”

She went on to say rightfully, ” … a country cannot really continue this way.”

Herein, is the gist of those aligned behind Mr. Trump.

The elites in politics, those holding power, those running and funding the two political parties are often, unlike the American citizen, buffeted and far removed from the laws, policies, programs and demands they create and impose on others, and from the harsh consequences of the ill-fated acts accorded their privileged positions.

Those who are the “unprotected” are Trump’s troops at present.

I recall seeing this “protected” class begin to form when I was on Capital Hill and politics turned toward a celebrity occupation, and away from a citizen-servant endeavor.

This is “the protected class” that Ms. Noonan sees.  Of course, they are joined by elites in academia, the media, entertainment and the press.

Now we have those who control, and the controlled.  Those who place their faith in government, and those who place their faith in God.  Those who suffer from slow economic growth and those who are unaffected by it.  Those who desire liberty and those who push dependence on the Nanny State.  Those who trust independent thought and those who would enforce group-think.   Those who fight and die for this land and their neighbors, and those who withdraw from such obligations.  Those serving others, and those serving only themselves.

Social philosophers are always saying the underclass must re-moralize.  Maybe it is the overclass that must re-moralize.

Peggy Noonan, in The Wall Street Journal, February 27-28, 2016

Maybe, indeed, it is.

Let us remember the 10th Amendment to our Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”  (Emphasis added.)

Better power be local, where we can keep an eye on it.

Shalom.