When friends or family complain about something I often joke, “It could be worse.  It could be me.”  After the “fiscal cliff” fiasco of the last week it is painfully apparent, it is me.  And, you.  It is all of us who find ourselves the recipients of the most incompetent governance possible.

Our elected officials are grown men and women pretending they have a clue about how to solve the problems of America from Washington when the problems of America lie where they have always; in the front room of the American family.  In the last week I have sat in my front room with my daughters and watched TV shows based 100% around unmarried, immature, overwrought men and women bedding each other like rabbits without a moment’s hesitation.  I am ashamed of myself for allowing such filth into my home and worse inviting it into the lives of my daughters.

Outside of the embarrassing failures of our representatives in government the most reported story of the weekend was the announcement of the pregnancy of Kim Kardashian.  Trumpeted all over the internet is the news that a woman who is mostly famous for screwing on video and selling it on the internet, marrying a basketball player and leaving him after less than three months has gotten pregnant by one man while still legally married to the other.  Sandra Flukes’ got nothing on this chick.

The out-of-wedlock birth rate is shockingly high when every statistic screams how children of unmarried parents not named West or Kardashian are practically doomed to a life of poverty and crime. We suffer over gay marriage when marriage as an institution is under attack on nearly every societal front.  We poke fun at Tim Tebow because he is rich, virtuous and proudly Christian when just a few years ago he would have represented the ideal of the young single American man. We promote promiscuity as if it were a positive model of behavior when medical science informs us it is a guarantee of disease, neurosis and heartache.  We parade sitcom after sitcom past the eyes and minds of our children where the married Mom and Dad are the clown princes and princesses of society and Charlie Sheen gets more famous for humiliating his wife, children, coworkers and faith while living with porn stars and is rewarded with a new sitcom built entirely around him. We pay people more money to stay on unemployment than any legitimate business could ever afford to pay entry-level employees and wonder why we have so many long-term unemployed.

We act like we have policy answers to ethical crises.  We don’t.  What makes that truth so aggravating is that we all know the answers to the problems.  We know.  We know that keeping score in games teaches the losers how much better they need to be and how hard being good really is.  We know that reasonably disciplining our children teaches right from wrong.  We know that shunning immoral behavior in the public square teaches people not to commit immoral acts.  We know that insisting our young men treat our young women with respect and gentleness creates a society where women can thrive. We know that teaching our daughters to live chaste until marriage insures the future of our grand-children and promotes marriages that are stable and loving.  We know that young men who get young women pregnant and don’t marry them and pay for the rearing of their children belong in prison for they have violated the most fundamental contract between parent and child. We know that women who cannot raise their children because they have not married the father and have no families to support them should find for those children a stable home to adopt, care for and love them.  We have stigmatized the mother who gave up her children for adoption because of the shame of her circumstance to the detriment of the millions raised in poverty so we could feel good. We know that rates of recidivism mean our children are not safe when murderers, child molesters and rapists are allowed to breathe free air yet we pretend there are cures for pure evil. We know that murder is wrong and that life begins at conception, (proven by science decades ago), yet we conspire to allow the murder of the innocent unborn everyday to absolve the parents of their crimes. We know we are more highly evolved than animals yet we fund groups like PETA who scream at us that we are no better than animals. And, then, we take license to behave like animals. We know that education in civics and philosophy, math and science, reading and history is the route to prosperity yet we teach our children politically correct summaries that fail to teach anything of use. We know that the ignorant are helpless and the helpless are hopeless and we allow our politicians to prey on that hopelessness to control us and create generations of hopeless children.

We know.

And, we know that if we want to solve the problems of America we must first address the real problem; Americans.