On Saturday my son was married. As such events often do, it caused me to ponder both future and past. My son’s in the first generation whose wedding gifts from the generation before come as a two-edged sword, because for perhaps the first time in American history the ladder of progress which each generation climbed a wrung at time appears broken.

The parents of today’s young brides and grooms put a man on the moon and sparked the Civil Rights and feminist movements. We created the computer revolution and, most of all, sparked a wave of consumption the world has never experienced.

All this has come at the expense of our children’s future. Start with Global Warming which for our children may represent the most formidable global crisis faced by modern humans. For our children it may be as defining and apocalyptic as the Black Plague of Medieval Europe.

Then there is the economy which right now is a shambles. The potential for generational warfare is very real as one generation hits retirement just as their sons and daughters face a Social Security system that has hit a crisis point. Meanwhile we have saddled our children with outrageous college education debts as they find attending college now leaves them with a debt equivalent to what some of us paid for our first houses–and at a higher interest rate. The third economic mess we have left them is the present housing and mortgage crisis which has made the dream of owning a home that seemed so easy for our generation all but inaccessible to our children’s.  Finally there is the so-called job market which has college graduates taking service jobs and feeling fortunate to have them.

On top of this add a nation with a deteriorating infrastructure and increasing corporate power and media concentration along with a world which has become ambivalent about America.

Frankly our generation should be ashamed at the wedding gifts we have left our children. For some reason our generation saw no imperative to make sure their children would have a better life than their parents. Instead we blew it on stuff. I know someone who bought his wife a new Mercedes convertible when their son graduated from high school. He went to State U when the price of that car could have sent him to any college in the country. That story repeats itself throughout our generation as parents buy toys for themselves and vote against new taxes that might help their sons and daughters pay off their college loans.

But nowhere is our generation’s tainted wedding gift to their children better demonstrated than in our education system which we have let lapse into free fall–again because we refuse to invest in it. I remember Peter Senge once saying that the ancient Chinese once had a saying that the mark of a society is how it treats its children.

My son and his wife received wedding gifts my wife and I do not even own, but the world they enter will make all those material gifts seem meaningless. They receive the bling of our consumer society, but together the two carry and are about to assume a tuition debt that will approach six figures. What good is a fancy knife set or dining room table for them? They could well end up hocking all the stuff on eBay to pay their bills.

Do we bequeath them a world better than the one we inherited?  Like all parents I believe my son and his new wife will do well to overcome these odds. But somehow it is hard to escape the guilt that we have left them a mess we haven’t even bothered to clean up.

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