Call me foolish, but I remember a day when telling the truth meant living the life.  A day when good people were honest people, and bad people were liars.  A day when integrity and morality and scruples were more than entries in a dictionary.  Today, you can hardly tell the difference between honest people and liars without a scorecard.

Where I live, we have neighbors who lie to us with impunity, merely to get their own way.  "We're pulling out these honeysuckle vines separating our properties so that we can plant something more valuable in their place."  That was two years ago--nothing has been planted yet.

We have corporate officers who lie to us with regularity in order to placate their friends and religious soul mates.  After voting for indemnification for out-of-pocket expenses we incurred in fighting an illegal takeover of the corporation, the board later denied having done so, despite having been audio taped to the contrary during an executive board session.

We have politicians who lie to us with abandonment, merely to get reelected.  Obama, the nation's liar-in-chief, is the most obvious candidate since he lies the most often, the most outrageously, and the most openly.  He is, they tell me, the top dog in political circles; therefore, he fosters the philosophy: I think; therefore, I lie.  So far, for him, it has worked.

Even our own relatives lie with increasing frequency.  A cousin, tired of being down on her luck, tried to convince my elderly parents that they owed her $50,000 from a business deal my parents had already concluded.  An uncle, tired of hearing about how successful his nephew the writer had become, tried to convince me that he had loaned me $500 through a surrogate, who had already been paid back in full and since passed away.  How convenient.

Even our teachers, our coaches, our clergymen, our law enforcement officials lie to us in order to further their often nefarious, nearly always illegal lifestyles while we are expected to sit by haplessly, awaiting the wrath of the Lord to descend upon them, to make things right.

But things are not right.  Something is wrong with all these people.  That is obvious.  Worse, something is wrong with all of us.

Those of us who crank out, and then walk away from, children without grounding them in the spiritual and moral obligations obligating their learning truth from fallacy--and knowing which to practice always--are contributing to the decay of American and world society. 

Those of us who raise conscientious, moral kids filled to the brim with integrity but don't teach them when and how to stand up against the others, the liars of the universe, are equally guilty.

Even those of us who never married, never had kids, and never plan to do so are too often guilty of hearing the lie, watching the indignity unfold, and turning our backs for fear of getting involved, becoming motivated, stirring resentment among our neighbors and peers.

Well, let me tell you something that, to me, has become frightfully obvious.  We have to get involved.  We can no longer afford to turn our backs.  We can no more afford to be contented victims raising replacement victims to go out into the world to raise yet more victims of their own.  We have to hold the liars of the universe accountable.

Call it a moral imperative: One of the Ten Commandments is "Thou shalt not lie."

Call it a moral necessity: One of the ways societies collapse is through the telling and the acceptance of lies.

Call it a moral right: Who should be allowed to lie to and demean you when you do not do likewise to another?

Or do you?

I learned when I was a kid just how evil, how nefarious, how personally harmful and shameful lying is.  I learned that liars, in order to defend their lies, must constantly revisit those lies to tell even more lies, greater lies to counter the truths brought up to defend against them.  And that is a virtual impossibility.  Unless, perhaps, you're willing to go to the extraordinary steps that Dorothy Parker did.  Parker, the sassy-tongued writer who once quipped, "Men seldom  make passes at girls who wear glasses," was a pathological liar.  Her lying--and being constantly ousted for her lies--became so blatant that she began keeping index cards of her lies, of what she told to whom and when, so as not to become confused and say the wrong thing. 

Is that the life you want for yourself?  For your children?  Is that living at all?  Or are you merely lying to yourself that it is?

Maybe it's time we started calling a lie a lie, confronting those who lie to us, and demanding the truth.  From our neighbors.  Our politicians.  Our relatives.  And all the others.

Of course, we're going to lose a few "friends" along the way.  But did you really want to be friends with someone whose word is absolutely worthless anyway? 

Liars have a way of saying anything to get what they want from life.  For some people like my uncle, it's a quick and dirty buck.  To others, like Obama and the rest of his Chicago-style dirty political minions, it's reelection.  If it takes Holder to lie to the American people about his involvement in security leaks and walking guns and murdered U.S. citizens, so be it.  After all, when did the truth last deliver any profits?

The truth, it seems, may be able to set you free.  But it will never make you rich.

And I…am D. J. Herda.

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D. J. Herda is President of the American Society of Authors and Writers (http://amsaw.org), an organization made up of authors, writers, editors, publishers, agents, directors, producers, and other media professionals who rely upon the printed word in the creation of quality literature and entertainment.  He is a member of the Author's Guild, a former member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and a former member of the National Press Club.  He has published more than 80 books and several hundred thousand articles, short stories, columns, interviews, plays, and scripts.