Look at the mess that kind of thinking has gotten us into. Our economy is trashed, as is our reputation around the world, several thousand of our children were sent to die in Iraq on the basis of a lie, and we are facing a world wide environmental crisis.

To those of you who have something to sell to the American people, I’d suggest trying a little honesty. It would be refreshing. Even better, it might work. You might find that people are willing to pay a little bit more for products that are peddled using accurate information instead of ludicrous stories and obvious pandering.

On the other side of this equation, I strongly suspect that people are going to become quite vengeful towards those that they feel put them in this position. They are going to wonder why the guy who sold all those sub-prime mortgages has a nice house while they are being foreclosed on. They’ll wonder why the CEOs and CFOs of all these corporations are getting paid bonuses when the end result of the work they did is the collapse of their companies and the world economy.

It used to be that honesty was taken for granted. Maybe we need to work on cleaning up our act and making it possible to live that way once more. It won’t solve all our problems, but perhaps it will make the ones that we have a little easier to face.