This week, Bill Moyers cited a passage from Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, a passage I suspect we’d find agreement with across the partisan divide:

Upon my return to Chicago, I would find the signs of decay accelerated throughout the South Side. The neighborhood shabbier, the children edgier and less restrained, more middle class families heading out to the suburbs, the jails bursting with flowering youth, my brothers without prospects. All too rarely, do I hear people asking just what it is that we’ve done to make so many children’s hearts so hard or what collectively we might do to right their moral compass, what values to live by. Instead I see us doing what we have always done, pretending that these children are somehow not our own.

Moyers likened this to a metaphor for our whole country. Whether you agree, or think it only valuable as a description of challenges in specific communities, if we’re honest with ourselves it is true at some level. Conservatives have been concerned with cultural coarsening and moral compasses in a way that rings hollow to liberals, yet I suspect Obama’s words hit a chord. Conservatives differ from liberals in how they’d solve the problem, but can we agree this is not what we want for our children?