The first rule of parenting is to ensure that as a father or mother, you don’t squander your moral authority in front of your children. Molding a child’s character is the most important job of any parent. To do that effectively, we must lead by example. If I tell my son not to watch pornography because it is harmful, I cannot then let him come home from school in the middle of the afternoon to find me openly looking at that kind of inappropriate material on the family room computer screen. If I were a hypocrite who does the very thing he tells other people not to do, I should at least make some attempt to hide that activity from him. Doing that in my bedroom with the door locked would be a good idea.

When I was a teacher in the K-12 public school system, there were certain words that we strictly forbade students from using in classrooms and within school buildings. “Stupid” was one of them. We taught the children to be respectful not only of the teachers, but also their fellow students. The best way to show that respect, we always insisted, was through the use of appropriate language in communication with their teachers and classmates.

For some ungodly reason, that forbidden word seems to be the favorite of our current president. He uses it frequently and openly, without regard to who is within earshot. It is the preferred adjective he employs to describe his predecessor and whatever he did as president. If judges issue rulings he doesn’t like, he loudly calls them all kinds of nasty names publicly.

Several senior officials in this administration have picked up this bad habit from their boss. They are routinely heard using some pretty foul language on television when speaking about people who have incurred their displeasure. In homes where parents consistently use such vernacular, their offspring, sooner or later, begin to do the same. That is how this one feels like.

Legal experts have been debating whether the president and some of his officials have been in defiance of court orders. Most of those experts say that they haven’t yet done so, but have come quite close to it. To laypeople like me, it already looks and feels like it.

And then there is the apparent mingling of the president’s personal business with his public duties. Until recently, it would have been unthinkable for a sitting president and his family members to engage so actively in so many private commercial activities. They fly around the world to cut business deals, often with states and entities that seek to gain favorable treatment in their own future transactions with the American government. All of those actions do not appear to be too troublesome to large segments of the public the way they used to be.

It is quite shocking to observe how nonchalant the entire American public seems about the use of such coarse language by the leader of the country and his associates, and the blurring of the lines between public and private activities. In the current atmosphere, is it possible for any teacher in any classroom in America to tell any student not to call someone stupid? By showing such little care about the president’s employment of abusive language, what authority do we really have at this point to teach children about the proper way to speak to others? And does the concept of ethics in government still exist?

Conservative Republicans talk about Christian and cultural values all the time. They never stop accusing liberal Democrats of debasing our national culture with their excesses. But when it comes to the president’s improprieties, these same people seem to have nothing to say. In the rare instances when they open up, they tell us that we should let Donald Trump be Donald Trump. Why? How could these conservatives not be bothered by their blatant hypocrisy?

Coarse language is one thing. What should really frighten us is the speed with which behaviors that were once unthinkable are being normalized. We like to say that we have a government of laws, not men. That is true, but every single one of the failed states that we know of today also have—or had—laws. What doomed them was the fact that they had national cultures in which people didn’t respect the laws on the books. Statutes mean nothing in environments where the socio-cultural norms that underpin law-abiding behavior either get destroyed, or don’t exist at all. While there is little chance that America will become a failed state, we shouldn’t be so sure as to take things for granted. Nothing is guaranteed in life.

Apparently, we are not overly concerned because we assume that after the president leaves office, we can re-sanitize our public discourse and reestablish whatever norms have been broken. That is dangerous complacency. Culture is like metal. Once it corrodes, it is impossible to restore it to its original state. But unlike rusted metal that can be sawed off and replaced with a brand-new sheet, we won’t be able to import some pristine culture from somewhere to substitute for the one that we have destroyed. We need to wake up before it is too late.