Walls

 

"When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt." ~Leviticus 19: 33-34

You have to do some fancy footwork to make that mean "Build a wall to keep those filthy drug-addicted disease-ridden foreigners out."

But I've seen pictures of Donald Trump holding a bible (albeit upside-down) and Joe Biden makes a point of going to mass every Sunday, so I guess there's a way. 

Not/But

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."  ~Ephesians 6:12

Disconnected

"We seem to have lost the sense that we can freely and happily extend ourselves for others. In modeling our social institutions on business principles, we have become very disconnected from our own noble heart."  ~Ogyen Trinley Dorje (source)

Who made who?

Excerpted from Maureen Dowd's  column in The New York Times, Sunday July 8, 2018:

Trump has certainly made political discourse more crude and belligerent. But is he making the whole country meaner, coarser, and less empathetic? Or was the pump primed for a political figure like him because the internet had already made America meaner, coarser and less empathetic?

Putting the blame on The Internet would seem to imply that we were always a vicious, self-centered people just waiting for the means to unleash our vitriol on the world.

I don't believe that.

I don't know what changed.

And I don't know how to change it back.

"President Trump."

In this excerpt from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams explains the political structure of his fictional world.  Actually, it would go a long way towards explaining our own:

The President in particular is very much a figurehead-- he wields no real power whatsoever.  He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage.  For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character.  His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it.  On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful presidents the Galaxy has ever had-- he has already spent two of his ten presidential years in prison in prison for fraud.  Very very few people realize that the President and the Government have virtually no power at all, and of those very few only six know whence ultimate political power is wielded.  Most of the others secretly believe that the ultimate decision-making process is handled by a computer.  They couldn't be more wrong.