I wonder if you feel this way. We face the greatest emergency in our adult lifetimes. It’s not the deficit. It’s the reality that one in five Americans does not have decent paying work and that one in four children are on food stamps–in the richest nation in human history. That is a five-alarm fire that should call upon us to pull out all the stops so that we don’t leave the scars of this emergency embedded in the country’s social fabric for generations to come.

   And, instead, we have an obsession about the fiscal deficit. By both parties. The president:

President Obama will call for a three-year freeze in spending on many domestic programs, and for increases no greater than inflation after that, an initiative intended to signal his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit, administration officials said Monday.

   The issue is not the focus on whether the cuts are big or modest. It is that we should be having this conversation–the conversation should be about how to invest more money into an economy to put people back to work.  

   And like an alcoholic family, too many people are pretending like the problem isn’t there and enabling the behavior of the addict–meaning, the people addicted to conventional thinking and a mindset that seeks to appease the bond markets and the very economic system that got us into this mess in the first place.

   We have lost our moral bearings. Actually, I would say our political leaders have lost their moral bearings.