Bread and Butter

I just ran across an essay by Mark Twain entitled 'Corn-Pone Opinions'. It has relevance for our day (and every other day). An excerpt:

Fifty years ago, when I was a boy of fifteen and helping to inhabit a
Missourian village on the banks of the Mississippi, I had a friend whose society
was very dear to me because I was forbidden by my mother to partake of it. He
was a gay and impudent and satirical and delightful young black man--a
slave--who daily preached sermons from the top of his master's woodpile, with me
for sole audience. He imitated the pulpit style of the several clergymen of the
village, and did it well, and with fine passion and energy. To me he was a
wonder. I believed he was the greatest orator in the United States and would
some day be heard from. But it did not happen; in the distribution of rewards he
was overlooked. It is the way, in this world.

He interrupted his preaching, now and then, to saw a stick of wood; but
the sawing was a pretense--he did it with his mouth; exactly imitating the sound
the bucksaw makes in shrieking its way through the wood. But it served its
purpose; it kept his master from coming out to see how the work was getting
along. I listened to the sermons from the open window of a lumber room at the
back of the house. One of his texts was this:

"You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his
'pinions is."

I can never forget it. It was deeply impressed upon me. By my mother. Not
upon my memory, but elsewhere. She had slipped in upon me while I was absorbed
and not watching. The black philosopher's idea was that a man is not
independent, and cannot afford views which might interfere with his bread and
butter. If he would prosper, he must train with the majority; in matters of
large moment, like politics and religion, he must think and feel with the bulk
of his neighbors, or suffer damage in his social standing and in his business
prosperities. He must restrict himself to corn-pone opinions--at least on the
surface. He must get his opinions from other people; he must reason out none for
himself; he must have no first-hand views.