When he was running for President -- before the major meltdown in his personal life --John Edwards used to talk about two Americas.

Every once in a while I think about that concept.

In the Nov. 1 Wall Street Journal, I read a column that was highly critical of the House Health Care Reform Bill. What struck me wasn’t that the column was critical of the plan; it was a phrase that really jumped out at me.

In bemoaning what they perceived to be the plan’s impact on the federal deficit the column mentioned “with spending and debt already at record peacetime levels….”

Peacetime?

The last I checked our nation is fighting not one, but two wars.

The statement about “peacetime” is symptomatic of the disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street that has caused a great deal of outrage against the financial establishment in this country.

While America is grappling with a double digit unemployment rate the stories of multi-million dollar bonuses make the front pages.

Whether the people getting the bonuses deserve them or not is not necessarily the issue. I’d bet that most are good, hard-working people. In politics and in public relations, it is all about timing and perception.

The perception is that Wall Street would still be a mess if it hadn’t been for a huge influx of taxpayer money. Money that was borrowed from rank and file citizens who work to make ends meet, to bail out companies that were reckless and perhaps greedy.

I know that we are all better off with a sound working financial system and that the government acted to insure the system we have. It is just a shock to so many out of work or struggling citizens to see how quickly the help of the American people has been forgotten and how quickly the multi-million dollar bonuses have returned.

To make matters worse, executives and business people appear on television to justify salaries that seem lavish and excessive in an age where wages and employment are falling for most Americans. The lack of empathy for what many in this country are going through is troubling.

But the resentment of those who rail against Wall Street is not healthy either. The so-called “Populist Backlash” won’t get anyone a job, or feed a hungry child, or help get treatment for a sick person who has been denied proper health care.

In our society it is easy to see how the disconnect occurs. People are busy with their jobs and their families. It is hard to look around and see the larger picture and how it impacts the lives of people you don’t know.

This is where the statement about peacetime in the Wall Street Journal hits home. For me, the wars in the Middle East were a distant thing. It was something I watched on the news, read about and prayed for to end.

That has changed over the past few years. I’ve gotten e-mails from soldiers in Iraq who are Penn State fans, and I have connected with some of them through correspondence. Bill Cahir, a friend from high school and a co-writer on the school paper, lost his life serving in Afghanistan after a few tours in Iraq.

The distant war had now landed here in my e-mail in-box and in my hometown. It had tragically taken someone my age.

Each weekend ABC’s Sunday news show “This Week” closes the show by showing the names of those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan the previous week. This past Sunday seven more soldiers’ names were shown.

Try telling those families of our soldiers killed in action that we are in peacetime.