A complacent generation has been too self-interested, too self-absorbed to meet the challenges we face.

“Family values” have become such a platitude these days that we hardly think about what they are. Political misuse of language has degraded a potentially significant phrase into a partisan weapon. Those who shout “family values” at every opportunity actually refer to a narrow range of issues that do not affect the majority of families. Americans who take family seriously have much more basic and pressing issues.

In real families, adults take responsibility for the future, for creating a future for their children that is safe and healthy. We readily accept sacrifices today to make that future more likely. But one family, even a whole neighborhood, can’t shape the broad environment in which our families live. In a globalizing world, one family’s control over the future shrinks alarmingly.

We have to select governments to act as America’s parents, to plan our country’s future. We believe that our democracy is the best system to create a thoughtful and caring government. But our current political parents have failed miserably. Instead of protecting our and our children’s future, they are ruining it. The politicians who run Washington have no family values.

Parents who harm their children’s health are universally despised. But our government allows dangerous chemicals to poison everything we touch. Our air is so polluted that our children can get sick just breathing. Only the federal government could enforce a means of protecting New England from the deadly particles that Midwestern coal plants put into the air.

Instead of leadership, we get denial, obfuscation, and inaction.

Rivers that once provided drinking water and recreation now kill their own fish. The fish we eat can kill us: tuna have mercury, salmon have PCBs. Giant hog farms in the Midwest pollute the ground water for miles around. Our children will inherit an Earth that our generation has poisoned. We hope the dose will not be fatal, no thanks to “conservatives” who don’t believe in conservation.

Responsible parents are cautious about the debt we take on to provide shelter for our families, paying the debt down as the family grows up. Few of us are accountants, yet we manage to plan our financial future responsibly. But our government has increased the country’s debt over the past five years by 25 percent and plans to keep borrowing.

The next generation will be saddled with an immense debt, payable to a Chinese government that cares little for our well-being. The politicians who borrow without end know their children will live comfortably, while ours pay the interest.

Good parents calm our children’s fears about the future, take them seriously, but counteract them with soothing words and persuasive explanations. Our government has done its best to create anxiety about America’s future.

To support a foolish plan to play the stock market with our retirement funds, the government tried to scare the country with misleading, but nightmarish, visions of Social Security bankruptcy. Meanwhile, it allows real pension funds to be gobbled up through mergers and acquisitions, ruining the retirement plans of millions of working parents and their families.

Parents are supposed to preserve the family’s resources, to ensure that our children can live at least as well as we have. Yet our government encourages the squandering of all of our precious resources: timber and oil, natural gas and natural beauty. Without any plan to make what we have last longer, the government desperately searches for new sources of energy. Politicians pretend that no sacrifice is necessary, because they are afraid to be honest with us.

Our children will pay the price long after the politicians are out of office.

Most important, parents protect children from danger. Yet our government sends our children across the globe to fight an endless war, allowing more than 2,000 to die in the sands of Iraq. From their safe havens in Washington, our political leaders terrorize us with scary stories, which turn out to be deliberate distortions of what they knew. Our children are dying every day, we are no safer now than before, and the storytellers refuse to admit that they were horribly wrong about the important issues.

Sometimes children must take control from their parents, when judgment fails, when parents lose their ability to protect their families. Our government has failed in its most fundamental jobs. It is time for us to seize control, to use our collective skills and experience to plan a better future for our children. They should be able to look forward to 60 years of healthy, happy secure life. We need to find a more honest and more reliable set of political leaders.

But our problems are not all the fault of partisan politicians.

My generation of baby boomers has been too complacent, too self-interested, too absorbed in the present. We know what family values really are. We need to take more personal responsibility for our children’s future. It isn’t enough just to think about money. We must change our lifestyles, and American politics as a whole. We can only do that together.

Steve Hochstadt teaches history at Bates College. He can be reached by e-mail at: [email protected].