• Third on my issue list is the loss of jobs, often as the result of the closing of job rich mills and factories. This is happening not just in the United States but also and with devastating results in Europe.  Here taken from the Times is an example of what is happening:
  

  REDCAR, England , a small town on the North Sea famous for a century-old mill that produced the steel for some of the world’s  iconic bridges, — for the Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia, the Victoria Falls Bridge in Zambia as well as for 1 World Trade Center in New York, was recently shattered by the news that the plant is about to shut forever, taking 2,200 jobs with it. The upheavals of what is rapidly becoming postindustrial Britain were recently on display at O’Grady’s, a local pub, as steelworkers shared their sorrow just a few feet away from a businessman who sells cheap Chinese steel to the British government, something many in Redcar complain about.
  “Everyone’s going crackers,” said Conrad McCormick, 38, a married father of two who lost his job at the mill, The only thing I’m sure of in my life right now is this,” he said, holding up a pint of beer.
 Across the pub, also pint in hand, stood Jim, a 61-year-old businessman who declined to give his surname. Jim said his midsize company was doing well selling Chinese and other foreign steel to the government to build railways, wind farms and public buildings.

• In fourth place on my list there’s God and religion, and with the world travels of Pope Francis, most recently to the United States, there are the more and more visible struggles of  the Catholic church to remain relevant.  At the Synod on the Family (three weeks between October 4 and 24) some 270 bishops of all stripes from fervent reactionaries to tolerant progressives, are meeting right now at the Vatican.
  So there are those for accepting change. Not all of the 270 bishops are reactionaries. This Pope is probably more liberal, more progressive than his predecessors and a good number of the bishops at the Synod and would probably, if he could, accept back into the church gays and lesbians, the divorced and remarried, and perhaps even those who have had an abortion. Evidently he’s not yet able to do that, but he must sense that it’s coming if the Catholic Church would remain a force for good in people’s lives.
  And there are those who would keep things as they are, the reactionaries, or as they would like to be called the traditionalists, who maintain that marriage is “indissoluble” and homosexuality is “intrinsically disordered.”
  Among their number is Cardinal Robert Sarah from Guinea who leads the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship, and who told the Synod,

“What Nazi-Fascism and Communism were in the 20th century, Western homosexual, abortion ideologies, and Islamic fanaticism are today.”

John Adams once wrote, “It was never pretended that any persons employed in [drafting the founding documents] had interviews with the gods or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven.” Ours was a government “founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretense of miracle or mystery.” … Evangelical Christians and Mormons are often at odds, but at some point they united in the belief that the Founders had acted as scribes for divine revelation. And there are those who continue to believe that angels bearing the word of God had been at the Constitutional Convention.

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