Humans are a flawed and complicated creation.  We are inherently lazy, arrogant, selfish, and weak.  At the same time, we have the capacity and desire to be deeply wonderful people.  We can and do become industrious, generous, compassionate and incredibly moral and strong individuals.

A successful society has certain checks and balances to ensure the industrious, morally good, practically intelligent, and strong outweigh the lazy, evil, willfully stupid and weak.  Darwin’s law handles some of that business…and we count on societal laws, mores, and folkways to deal with the rest.  It used to be there were nice rewards for the “good” behavior.  Just as there were disapproving reactions to the “bad” behavior.  The disapproval from the majority of society toward the lazy and morally corrupt was essential for society to flourish.    You either got your act together or you continued to feel and be shamed and that wasn’t much fun.  And it didn’t pay well.

So, historically, if you acted badly and not in the best interest of yourself, your family, your community, or your country, you were shamed.  Privately. Deep inside your soul. Or publicly, if you were a particularly heinous jackass.   You would have felt ashamed of yourself.  And, hopefully, you would strive to control or change the behavior, because shame and failure is a great motivator. Shame is useful and necessary to keep civilization humming along.

But somewhere along the convoluted way, people have bought into the idea that shame is bad for your self-esteem.  Oh, brother! Frankly, it’s a damn shame self-esteem has become an excuse for excusing bad behavior!

So here we are…a country full of shameless people who run amok, not giving a rat’s ass about how their actions affect anybody else, living the dream on someone else’s dime, and not spending one nanosecond on an introspective peek into the black hole where their integrity should be. And no one is willing to publicly shame them because the whole country is so saturated with self-esteem issues.  Try telling a third generation welfare recipient with 8 kids, no husband, and a Louis Vuitton handbag she should be ashamed of herself and see what happens.

When a public figure, say a married man running for public office whilst waving his penis around for random women doesn’t feel the slightest iota of dishonor, and still runs for office, where is the shame?

How do people continue to defiantly demand that all their food, housing, recreation, benefits, and education be paid for by people who actually work for living and pay their own way?  Where is the shame?

I could go on and on with examples of the utter lack of shame demonstrated daily, which culminates with a peevish and petulant President who feels no shame using a government “shutdown” to punish veterans and other Americans opposing his unpopular, catastrophic healthcare plan.

Yeah… I wish a ton of shame onto America.  We need it.