76-01-B5
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Shaping the World for 100 Years to Come[edit]
Transcript[edit]In this election year, many of us talk about the world of tomorrow, but do we really think about it? I'll be right back. Sometimes it's very easy to be glib about how decisions we're making will shape the world for a hundred years to come. Then a few weeks ago I found myself faced with having to really think about what we're doing today and what people not history people like ourselves will say about us. I'd been asked to write a letter for a time capsule which would be opened a hundred years from now. The occasion will be the Los Angeles Bicentennial and, of course, our country's Tricentennial. It was suggested that I mentioned some of the problems confronting us in this election year. Well since I've been talking about those problems for some nine months, this didn't look like too much of a chore. So riding down the coast highway from Santa Barbara—a yellow tablet on my lap, somebody else was driving, I started to write my letter to the future. It was a beautiful summer afternoon, the Pacific stretched out to the horizon on one side of the highway, and on the other, the Santa Ynez mountains were etched against the sky as blue as the ocean. I found myself wondering if it would there still be a coast highway. Will people still be traveling in automobiles or will they be looking down at the mountains from aircraft or moving so fast the beauty of all this would be lost? Suddenly the simple drafting of a letter became a rather complex chore. Think about it for a minute. What do you put in a letter that's going to be read a hundred years from now—in the year 2076? What do you say about our problems when those who read the letter will know what we don't know—namely how well we did with those problems? In short, they will be living in the world we help to shape. Will they read the letter with gratitude in their hearts for what we did or will they be bitter because the heritage we left them was one of human misery? Oh I wrote of the problems we face here in 1976—The choice we face between continuing policies of the last 40 years that have led to bigger and bigger government, less and less liberty, redistribution of earnings through confiscatory taxation or trying to get back on the original course set for us by the Founding Fathers. Will we choose fiscal responsibility, limited government and freedom of choice for all our people or will we let an irresponsible Congress set us on the road our English cousins have already taken? The road to economic ruin and state control of our very lives? On the international scene, two great superpowers face each other with nuclear missiles at the ready—poised to bring armageddon to the world. Those who read my letter will know whether those missiles were fired or not either they will be surrounded by the same beauty we know or they will wonder sadly what it was like when the world was still beautiful. If we here today meet the challenge confronting us,—those who open that time capsule a hundred years from now will do so in beauty peace prosperity and the ultimate in personal freedom. If we don't keep our rendezvous with destiny, the letter probably will never be read because they will live in the world we left them a world, in which no one is allowed to read of individual liberty or freedom of choice. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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