we owe them ... what??

The kind of politics that teaches us all we owe to those who came before us and those who will come after. That each of us has drunk from wells we did not dig; that each of us has been warmed by fires we did not build.
-- Mark Shields

The people running this country (the ones with political power every day, as opposed to you & me, who only get it on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November of even numbered years) fail to get the part about "we owe to ... those who come after [us]."

I am sick & tired of hearing about how we owe all this to those who came before us, intoned in quiet voices of reverential awe, or strident ringing admonitions. That would be 'those who came before us' and bequeathed us a world riven with environmental destruction and economic disasters and globalization of war and the privatization of governmental ethics.

I don't care if the world does revolve around you - it's still there, and without anything circling you, you're just a useless point.