A Letter to the People of 2126

I recently listened to Ronald Reagan’s remarkable speech at the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City.

Near the end, Reagan recalled being asked to write a letter for a time capsule; a letter addressed to the people who would open it one hundred years later, in 2076.

As I listened, something dawned on me:

What if I were given the same assignment today?

What would I write in a letter placed in a time capsule in 2026, to be opened one hundred years from now?

And there is an intriguing historical symmetry to this. Reagan gave that speech 50 years ago, on August 19, 1976.

We are almost exactly halfway between his 1976 audience and the people who would have opened his hypothetical time capsule in 2076.

So perhaps this isn’t simply an imitation of Reagan’s idea.

Perhaps it is picking up Reagan’s question at the halfway point… and asking it again. Only this time, the letter is addressed not to 2076.

It is addressed to 2126. To those who open this letter one hundred years from today: You know everything about us.

We know nothing about you.

You know who won our elections. You know how our wars ended. You know which nations survived, which disappeared, and which rose to take their place.

You know whether the technologies that astonish us today ultimately liberated mankind… or diminished it.

You know whether artificial intelligence became one of humanity’s greatest tools, or whether we surrendered too much of our judgment, our creativity, and perhaps even our humanity to the machines we created.

You know whether we cured diseases that have haunted mankind for centuries.

You know whether the extraordinary scientific advances beginning in our time extended human life… and whether those additional years made human life better.

You know whether our children and grandchildren inherited a cleaner, healthier planet.

You know whether the nuclear weapons that still sit silently in arsenals around the world remained silent.

We don’t.

And that is what makes writing this letter so difficult.

Because from where we stand in 2026, the future still looks like a blank page. But from where you sit in 2126, we are history.

And history has a peculiar way of speaking to us across generations. There is a saying often attributed to Mark Twain:

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

We don’t know exactly how the next hundred years will rhyme with the hundred that came before us.

But we know enough history to understand that human nature has not changed nearly as much as our technology has.

We know that prosperous societies can become complacent. That free societies can surrender their freedoms.

That ancient hatred can return wearing modern clothes.

And that people who believe themselves immune from history often discover, too late, that they are not.

You know whether we learned those lessons.

You know what we did with the choices that were still ours to make. You know whether the United States remained a free republic.

You know whether freedom of speech survived an age in which people increasingly demanded protection from ideas they disliked… and demanded justice against those who disagreed with them.

You know whether Americans continued to believe that citizenship carried obligations as well as rights.

You know whether we remembered that democracy requires something more difficult than voting… it requires accepting that people with whom we profoundly disagree are still our fellow citizens.

You know whether we preserved institutions imperfectly handed down to us by generations before us, or whether, convinced of our own wisdom, we tore them apart without understanding why they had been built.

You know whether truth still mattered.

That question particularly troubles me.

We live at a moment when almost every human being carries in their pocket access to more information than the greatest libraries of previous centuries could contain.

And yet we increasingly struggle to agree on what is true. There is another saying often attributed to Mark Twain:

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

In Twain’s time, a lie still had to travel by newspaper, telegraph, or word of mouth. In ours, it can travel around the world in seconds.

By the time truth has put on its shoes, the lie may have been seen by millions of people, repeated thousands of times, amplified by algorithms… and accepted as fact.

Technology allows us to communicate instantly across oceans, continents, cultures and languages.

Yet somehow, we seem to have more difficulty talking to the person standing across the street.

We have built machines capable of connecting billions of people.

And we are discovering that connection is not the same thing as communicating.

Perhaps you solved that.

I hope you did.

You also know something else we cannot know. You know what became of the Jewish people.

As I write this, nearly eight decades have passed since the Holocaust and almost eight decades since the rebirth of the State of Israel.

The Jewish people possess something my grandparents’ generation could scarcely have imagined while Jews were being murdered across Europe:

A sovereign Jewish state. A Jewish army.

The ability of Jews, finally, to defend themselves.

And when I think about what happened in 1948, I keep returning to something the Jewish scholar Ruth Wisse has said.

Consider the magnitude of it.

In 1945, the world discovered the full horror of what had been done to the Jews of Europe.

Six million murdered. Entire communities erased. Families destroyed.

A civilization that had flourished in Europe for centuries nearly annihilated.

And then… three years later… Israel.

A people who had been scattered for nearly two thousand years returned to their ancestral homeland and restored Jewish sovereignty.

That was more than the creation of another country.

It was a civilizational resurrection.

Wisse has described the creation of the State of Israel as “the most hopeful moment in civilization since the dove came with the olive leaf to Noah’s Ark.”

Think about what that means.

Three years after one of mankind’s greatest atrocities… not revenge.

Not surrender.

Not disappearance.

Resurrection.

The Jewish people answered an attempt to erase them from history by writing, in capital letters: HERE.

We are still here.

And yet antisemitism, which so many hoped would have been buried beneath the ruins of Auschwitz, is still with us.

It has changed its vocabulary. It has changed its clothing.

It has migrated from churches to political movements, from drawing rooms to universities, from whispered prejudice to social media.

But it survives.

History may not be repeated.

But sometimes it rhymes.

So, I wonder about you.

Is there still a State of Israel in 2126?

Is Hebrew still spoken in the streets of Jerusalem?

Do Jewish children in America still know why they are Jewish? Do they know the Torah?

Do they know where their grandparents and great-grandparents came from?

Do they understand that Judaism is not merely a religion of persecution and remembrance, but a civilization of ideas, argument, family, responsibility, learning, and extraordinary resilience?

Do they understand that they belong to a people connected to one another… and to their ancestral homeland?

Do they still know the meaning of am?

Did we teach them well enough?

Or did we become so comfortable that we forgot that civilizations do not perpetuate themselves automatically?

You already know the answer. We don’t.

And perhaps that is the most humbling thing about writing to you.

Because every great question that causes us anxiety today has become, for you, simply history.

You know whether China and the United States became enemies or found a way to coexist.

You know what happened in the Middle East.

You know whether Russia’s ambitions brought greater war to Europe. You know whether religious extremism had receded or spread.

You know whether democracy expanded or authoritarianism did.

You know whether America remained the world’s indispensable nation… or voluntarily surrendered that role.

You know whether capitalism continued lifting people from poverty while finding ways to temper its excesses.

You know whether our universities rediscovered their purpose as places where ideas could be challenged rather than protected from challenge.

You know whether parents once again taught children that freedom and responsibility are inseparable.

You know whether we learned to disagree without hating one another. And perhaps most important of all:

You know whether we did not forget that a civilization can be lost.

We sometimes behave as though the freedoms surrounding us are part of some natural order.

They are not.

Human history tells a very different story. Freedom is unusual.

Self-government is unusual. Religious liberty is unusual.

The peaceful transfer of political power is unusual.

The right to criticize one’s government without fearing a knock on the door in the middle of the night is unusual.

These things exist because generations before us fought for them, argued for them, sacrificed for them and, when necessary, died for them.

We inherited their work.

You inherited ours.

And so, I find myself wondering what you think of us. Do you look back across these hundred years and say:

They were terribly divided, but when the moment came, they understood what was at stake.

They argued bitterly, but they did not destroy the institutions that allowed them to argue.

They created astonishing technologies but remained masters of those technologies rather than becoming their servants.

They understood that progress did not require abandoning everything that came before them.

They preserved freedom. They defended civilization.

They taught their children who they were.

They left us something worth inheriting.

I hope so.

I hope somewhere in your history books there is gratitude for the generations living at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Not because we were perfect. We certainly are not.

But when confronted with the great questions of our time, we eventually recognized them for what they were.

Tests.

Tests of courage. Tests of judgment. Tests of character.

And tests of whether a free people, blessed with more prosperity, knowledge, and technological power than any generation in human history, possessed enough wisdom to use those gifts well.

You already know whether we passed.

We are still taking the test.

And perhaps that is the message I most want to leave you. The people of 2026 were not characters in a history book.

We were students.

We were husbands and wives. Parents and grandparents.

Immigrants and descendants of immigrants. Believers and nonbelievers.

Republicans and Democrats.

Jews, Christians, Muslims, and people of every faith and of no faith. We worried about our children.

We argued about politics. We went to work.

We paid our bills.

We celebrated weddings and mourned our parents. We laughed.

We fought. We loved. We cried.

And most of us, regardless of our differences, wanted essentially the same thing: to leave our children a world a little better than the one entrusted to us.

Whether we succeeded is no longer our question. It is yours to answer.

And if, on August 22, 2126, you are reading this letter in a nation that is still free, on a planet largely at peace, surrounded by children who know their history but are not imprisoned by it.

Then perhaps you might spare a thought for us.

And say:

Thank God they understood, before it was too late, that the future was depending on them.

Because today, in 2026, we are beginning to understand something you already know:

The future is not something that happens to us. It is something we leave behind.