Dear Millennials: I'm sorry we didn't stop them

[thucythucy]

42. My partner was in the House gallery the vote on the first Reagan budget was passed;

Speaker O'Neill begged his members to vote against the bill. He acknowledged that members were receiving calls and letters running ten to one and more to "support the president." This was in the aftermath of the shooting, when there was a 9-11 type response to a national trauma. He still urged them to do the right thing.

That hardly seems like "caving" to me. It doesn't reflect well on the Democrats who voted for the budget, but I don't blame that on O'Neill.

After the vote, my partner was invited into O'Neill's office, along with other disability advocates. He openly wept about the result. He told her, "The haters have won."

Reagan was indeed responsible for much misery, the aftermath of which is still with us. The AIDS epidemic, which Reagan ignored for years, left an incredible trail of devestation. His tax cuts for the rich began our "trickle down" cascade of endless budget shortfalls. His support of the Contras and the death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala destablized much of Central America, which has a direct link to our immigration issues today. His attacks on higher education, including funding for students and subsidies to colleges and universities, are directly linked to today's college debt crisis. And so on and so forth.

I hope people do blame Reagan for decades to come, since he deserves it. As does Bush II for the disaster in Iraq. Is there a statute of limitations on such behavior? One major problem with politics today is our ridiculously short national attention span. We are, as Gore Vidal so aptly labeled us, "the United States of Amnesia."

I thought you were younger. It seems at sixty-five then you must have been integrally involved in the struggles of the past 35 years, so I thank you. I wonder though what turning points you witnessed, when the tide might have been turned but Democrats and progressives refused to act.