The war on the future

Senator Paul Sarbanes will be this year's university commencement speaker. The following is not the text of the speech he will give, but it should be:

Ladies and gentleman of the class of 2006, congratulations on your achievements. Your graduation is certainly worthy of celebration. Yet, as with many things in life, with this joy comes an accompanying responsibility. It is with the latter in mind that I speak to you of a serious conflict that will dominate our political discourse for the next 20 years.

The grave war I speak of will not be fought in the deserts of Iraq or the mountains of Afghanistan; it will be waged in town hall meetings, neighborhood bars, coffee-shop counters, schools and, ultimately, congressional elections. It will not be a struggle for land, money or even oil, yet its outcome will impact all three. More than anything to date, this war will determine our country's impact on the world, and our civilization's ultimate place in the history of the universe.

Throughout the ages, people have found various esoteric reasons to fight wars. Yet at the heart of this one rests a simple question: Should we as a society continue to embrace the future?

You may not have noticed, but the opening salvos in the war on the future have already been fired. While you were busy studying the past four years, the current presidential administration increased the national debt by more than all of the previous presidents combined. By and large, this borrowed money has not been invested in the future; rather, it's been used to placate the past by giving tax breaks to the wealthy and dangerously expanding entitlement programs such as Medicare. In essence, your parents' generation is paying for its excesses by taxing the young and the yet unborn.

The recent hysteria over globalization and outsourcing represents a front of the war that is potentially even more dangerous. One of the great successes of the past 30 years was the emergence of several hundred million people in India and China from poverty. Perversely, the anti-future crowd views this economic miracle with apprehension and fear. We are told foreigners are taking "our" jobs, as if our economy represents a static and optimal allocation of resources which cannot be altered in any positive way.

Throughout history, much of our amazing technological progress owes itself to the accomplishments of a relatively minuscule number of people. Even today, less than 5 percent of the people in the world live in this country. Think about how much more we could accomplish if we had more than six billion people working to cure cancer, develop great products and generally advance the frontiers of human knowledge. If we close ourselves to the rest of the world because of misplaced fears from those who worship the status quo, we will never know what we could have collectively accomplished.

The real cause of the war on the future is a dangerous societal attitude shift. This country was made great by the labor of those who lived within their means and saved for the day they and their ancestors could live the "American dream." Today, the prevailing spirit is rapidly changing to one of excessive consumption and entitlement. The personal savings rate over the last few years has hovered at about zero because we now believe we are "entitled" to having our retirements provided for us by the government. The focus is irrevocably shifting from sacrificing some present consumption for the sake of the future to sacrificing future growth for the sake of the present. No society that is so passionate about complacency can honestly expect to remain a world power indefinitely.

So why am I telling you this? Because as recent college graduates, you are in a unique situation. You are young enough to have a time horizon that allows you to look decades into the future and are educated and mature enough to do something about what you see. If the forces of the future are going to prevail, you will be responsible for leading them. The fate of our society is in your hands.

Alex Frey is a senior electrical engineering major. He can be reached at frey@umd.edu.