By Reg Henry

Dear Generations As Yet Unborn,

If American society is as dysfunctional and discourteous in your time as it is in ours, nobody has bothered to apologize to you for the legacy my generation has visited upon yours.

Let me make amends. Of course, I am not sure how I am going to bring this sorrowful message to you, but perhaps you will do a computer search for the words “What were they thinking?” and come upon this mea culpa.

First, a general “sorry about that” for the pile of ordure deposited on your generational doorsteps by herds of elephants and donkeys. Really, we are terribly sorry for the way we have left the world. Nothing personal.

When you wonder, “What were they thinking?” you should take it from one who was there that very little thinking was going on.

Sadly, this has led to extreme points of view seeming almost normal, as people in our time preferred to yell at each other when they were not spouting ideological catchphrases. Those who yelled the loudest and hated the most became celebrities with big followings on radio and TV.

How we got to this sorry situation is hard to say, but in my view it can be attributed largely to an outbreak of national amnesia. As I write, the huge federal deficit and failing economy that is our special gift to you is being tied with a red bow. (The bow has been dyed with red ink — a nice touch.) It happened like this: A president named Bill Clinton ended his term with a surplus, but few can remember that, and those who do just ignore reality and argue that it didn’t happen.

Then came a president who turned his party into big spenders the likes of which had not been seen since the invention of Democrats, and he cut taxes, too, forgetting what happened the last time this was tried under that lovable old amnesiac Ronald Reagan.

Strangely, supporters have erased the last president’s name from the records, making it the worst social faux pas to mention him in mixed company. (Psst — between the two of us, it was George W. Bush.) This was cunning amnesia because it allowed the whole problem to be blamed on his successor, Barack Obama.

Shortly after Obama took over, a group of tea drinkers suddenly woke up and were shocked to learn that emergency spending was under way to fuel a revival of the economy according to a conventional economic prescription.

They were angry, as only people who have just woken up can be, and they wore silly hats and talked gleefully about revolution. They protested so much they got others of selectively forgetful minds elected to Congress.

For them, the best part was the deficit was not only the biggest problem — they forgot about jobs, because most of them were employed themselves — but also it was all Obama’s fault! So we have lurched from one extreme to the other and have let the whole world know that our national commitment to honor debts is not sacred; it is at the whim of people wearing tea bags as fashion accessories.

We will cut spending, but not in any sensible way. We have turned the stock market into a yo-yo. We have taken the slowly reviving economy and killed it for a generation.

That would be your generation, dear folks of the future, but you already know that. Sorry, but the devil and the talk shows made us do it.

Having no crystal ball, I must make an educated guess at the other dreadful consequences of folly we have left you to deal with. I suppose you are reading this indoors, for fear of hurricanes, floods, blizzards or days of record-setting cold.

Sorry for making our unusual weather your usual, thanks to our ignoring of global climate change. Still, the drowning of Florida by rising sea levels probably was not all bad.

Sorry about the gas masks you have to wear outside. Someone got the bright idea that we didn’t need a red tape-dispensing Environmental Protection Agency to protect the environment, because companies could be trusted to do the right thing by the American people and not solely for their bottom line. Unfortunately, Congress forgot to amend the laws of human nature.

Sorry for the continuing wars, sorry for old people continuing to fill your jobs after Social Security’s retirement age was raised and Medicare was privatized. Sorry, sorry, sorry. We didn’t think it would come to this. In truth, we forgot to think at all.

— Reg Henry is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Reach him at [email protected]

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