There’s a scene in the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day when Phil Connors—trapped in the same day over and over again—turns to two guys in a bar and asks, “What if there were no tomorrow?”

One turns to him and says, “That would mean there would be no consequences. We could do whatever we wanted!”

It gets a good laugh in the movie, but now it sounds less like comedy and more like a warning.

Recently, a friend asked, “Do ethical values still matter, or are they fading from American life?”

I wish the answer were obvious.

But look around. Our politics are angrier, our culture more divided, institutions less trusted. Too many leaders appear more interested in winning than in serving, and too many people behave as if tomorrow will never come, as if there will be no consequences for dishonesty, cruelty, corruption, or indifference.

Each day, the cycle continues—same anger, same division, and the same failure to ask what kind of country we are becoming.

Amorality is no longer hiding at the edges. It is moving closer to the center of American life.

That’s what makes the question more urgent than ever.

America was founded on a powerful set of values: liberty, justice, equality, self-government, individual rights, and the belief that public life requires something more than private ambition.

Those values were not always practiced.

The nation that declared “all men are created equal” tolerated slavery. The country that spoke of liberty denied it to millions. Women, Native Americans, enslaved people, and many others were excluded from the full promise of the American ideal.

The great moral question of American history has never been whether our values sounded noble, but whether we had the courage and discipline to live up to them.

The division over slavery became so deep that Americans turned against one another at the cost of more than 600,000 lives.

During World War II, America still struggled with racism, antisemitism, internment, inequality, and political conflict. But when the threat became clear, the nation found a common cause.

At the height of the threat, Americans understood that democracy and freedom were worth defending.

That’s what feels different today.

Freedom becomes the freedom to ignore the common good. Patriotism becomes loyalty to a party or a personality. Truth becomes negotiable. Service becomes branding. And leadership… leadership has become performance.

Ethical values are not fading because they’ve lost relevance. They’re fading because too many invoke them when they are useful and abandon them when the cost is too high.

Years ago, after I spoke to a group about ethics at a conference, an older gentleman approached me in a hotel lobby with a story.

It was during the Depression, he began. His father did not have regular work, but he had a reputation for great integrity. One day, the owner of a local bar offered him a job as a bartender. The pay was good—thirty-five dollars a week at a time when that meant real security for a struggling family. But there was a problem: the man did not drink, and his religious principles opposed drinking.

So he went home and brought the decision to his family.

He explained that the job would help them financially, but it would also require him to do something he believed was wrong. Then he asked his wife and children what he should do.

His eight-year-old son asked, “Will Grandpa know about this job?”

“No,” his father said. “Grandpa lives several hundred miles away.”

Then the boy asked, “Will God know about this?”

His father smiled. He had his answer. He turned down the job.

Whether one agrees with his view of drinking is not the point. He believed integrity meant something even when no one else was watching—and even when doing the right thing came at a cost.

A lack of that kind of integrity is the real crisis today.

A nation can survive argument. It can survive protest and political tension. What it cannot survive indefinitely is the collapse of shared moral ground: the belief that truth matters, character matters, accountability matters, and leadership means something more than gaining power.

We’ve been divided before. We’ve also been united before. The question now is whether we still know the difference between a country that merely repeats its values and a country willing to live by them.

Part II, Wednesday.