A stylish lady, swathed in winter furs, walks gracefully down the urban sidewalk, led by a Boston terrier. She carries in one hand the leash that connects her to the dog, and in the other a paper bag and a pooper scooper.

When the dog stops to do his business, she waits patiently with her scooper ready for action. Finished, the animal prepares to move on but the lady has a task to do. She stoops over, scrapes the poop off the pavement, and deposits it in the bag. Then, her dignity intact, she proceeds on her way.

This scenario, repeated all over America by all sorts of dog owners, is one that I never expected to see. During most of my life, I was accustomed to walking through, around, and sometimes into, dog leavings on city sidewalks and streets.

It would always be that way, I was convinced, and there would never be anything I could do about it. My shoes would always be at risk of tracking home dog leavings with their noisome smell.

Yet, that situation changed and virtually everyone with a dog now observes the new rite of life in public. If peaople violate this practice, they are subject to social disapproval. Strong social backing would embolden me to reprimand anyone who neglected what is almost universally seen as their duty.

That this change in public mores took hold, and did so in short order, still amazes me. How did it happen? What influences had to accumulate to bring about such an unexpected transformation of public conduct?

The answers to these questions I do not know. Nor have I ever seen in writing an analysis of a social change that may not be among the most important in American history but is surely of interest.

It would probably take a sociologist with special knowledge to track the attitudinal shifts that led to this change. If there was a large-scale public campaign, backed by big money, I remain unaware of it.

I suspect, rather, a series of small changes of values. Gradually, people may have come to care more about the beauty of their environment than they did about the laissez- faire freedom of dog walkers to allow their animals to soil it with impunity.

Another benefit of the current norms is that they require dogs to be leashed. No longer does one commonly see these animals wondering around on their own the way cats still do. Now each dog must be attached to a human being clearly identified as responsible for the dog’s behavior.

So maybe we can attribute to the environmental movement the readiness of people to clean up after their dogs. In any event, I count it social progress; America is the better for it.

What still surprises me is the lack of any embarrassment felt by pooper scoopers. After all, it could be seen as humiliating for dignified people to be shoveling into a container their dog’s daily offerings.

But during a recent weekend in Manhattan, I observed locals galore carrying out this chore with aplomb. They seemed not to find anything undignified in wielding the scooper. My parents, however, almost surely would have.

I cannot imagine either my mother or my father submitting to this ritual. Nor would most of their friends have done so. That was a different era, when middle-class Americans behaved more formally in public.

It speaks well for our contemporaries, I suppose, their flexibility in accepting change. As a beneficiary of their readiness to adopt the current norms, I feel thankful that steaming messes no longer lurk in my path.

For the most part, however, dog owners probably do not have much awareness of operating in a changed environment. Young people, especially, may simply accept without reflection the current situation as the long established norm.

However, I find it valuable to reflect on the ways in which society changes. Long life offers a fine vantage point from which to take note of transformations. Looking back to your childhood, you can see how things that seemed securely fixed in place have become dislodged and you can ponder the reasons why that happened.

The French do not have it exactly right when they say “plus ça change, plus la même chose.” (The more things change, the more they stay the same.) There are ways in which society changes and brings in something definitely new.

Looking at things from the eminence of many decades can enable us to evaluate change and to distinguish between the desirable and the undesirable. On rare occasions, when acting in organized groups, we may have the opportunity to influence society’s acceptance or rejection of looming change.

The lady in fur with her terrier represents a step forward. Though I may observe her with a certain detachment and even amusement, I still appreciate what she is doing for me and other pedestrians like me.

Richard Griffin

The last time I went to a pro football game, the Boston Yanks were playing someone or other. That must have been sometime between 1944 and 1948, during that team’s short lifetime.

Not having saved the program, I cannot be more precise about the date or the game itself. To recall in detail a sports event occurring some 60 years ago poses a test I cannot pass.   

My father probably had free tickets, available for a newspaperman like him. The game had to have taken place at Fenway Park, awkwardly pressed into service as a football stadium.

Most likely, I saw the Yanks lose because that is what they did most of the time. In their first year, they won two and lost eight. Improving slightly on this record in the other three years was not enough to preserve the franchise.

Since the era when I attended my last one, I have seen hundreds of professional football games. But all of them have come to me via television. My fandom is entirely at an electronic remove.

To believe Adam Gopnik, that means I am missing a lot of the real drama of the game. Writing in the New Yorker, he claims that we TV fans get too restricted a view of the game. By contrast, if you’re there, you can see the development of dramatic situations rather than just their outcome.

“The real excitement of the game on the field,” he writes, “lies in the sudden moments of frenzied improvisation, most often by the linebackers and especially by the safeties, who on television mainly appear at the end of the play to make a hit or swipe vainly at a pass.”

But Gopnik and his like sit in the press box, not the stands. I have sat in both─though not at pro football games─and can witness to the difference. Those privileged to sit on high do not experience restricted views; grandstand viewers often do.

People will stand up in front of you, sometimes at crucial moments, to go out for a beer and a hot dog. Some of that beer may end up on you.

When the game ends, you may have to spend hours getting to your car and navigating your way along the highway, as did friends of mine who recently went to their first Patriots game.

Meantime, however distorted my view, I am enjoying the game in the comfort of my favorite rocking chair. Most important, I am free to pursue other pleasures all the while. I would never sit in front of a TV sports event without a book, magazine, or puzzle to occupy the many breaks in the action.

For fear this behavior seem eccentric, let me cite some statistics. Three years ago, Richard Sandomir, a New York Times writer, compared the amount of actual playing time in a televised college bowl game and the time when the football was not in play.

The game lasted more than three hours; only 7.3 percent of that time was given to actual play. That means a mere 16 minutes and 28 seconds went to football action. During this bowl game, there were 79 commercials and 35 promotions for upcoming programs.

Admittedly, pro games are shorter than postseason college games, but much of the television time devoted to watching the pros does not go into football itself.

However, even comfortably settled before the TV screen, I do not qualify as an untroubled fan. What bothers me is my implicit endorsement of a system that I consider morally dubious.

The sports page last week featured a lineman for the Philadelphia Eagles who has successfully lowered his weight from 397 pounds to a mere 335. The writer praises the player for this achievement.

A system that pressures people to beef up their bodies to even the lower figure strikes me as less than ethical. For young men to fatten themselves like this cannot be good for their health.

And this practice, commonly begun in college if not in high school, has made  injuries a standard part of the game.

How can you be knocked on your head by a 300-pound-plus lineman running at full speed without suffering physical trauma? Or how can such a behemoth land on your leg and not cause you serious injury?

Those who have retired from the game, some after only a year or so, will carry their injuries with them for the rest of their lives. Rare is the footballer who does not have knee problems or other disabling conditions.

Prospective players are confronted with a devil’s bargain. You sell out to the demands for bulk and you reap rewards, but, very likely, you pay for them for the rest of your days.

As of this writing, the Patriots prepare to face the San Diego Chargers, the team with the best record in the league. I will be rooting for the Patriots, in comfort but not without misgivings.

Richard Griffin

Maybe our daughter ought to change careers. To be sure, her talents suit nicely the publishing business in which she works now. But Emily has other gifts that can sometimes surprise even us, her parents.

Last week, she demonstrated dazzling skills in the role of what used to be called efficiency expert but what we might now dub “clutter consultant.”

Home to celebrate Christmas, New Year’s Day, and her 27th birthday with us, our daughter took it upon herself to set our household straight.

That meant embarking on the monumental job of throwing out a wide variety of stuff no longer useful to us. For that she ransacked our small house from top to bottom. Before leaving town, this enterprising young woman initiated a clearing-out process that has transformed our place, at least for now.

First, she bought us a shredding machine and reduced to pieces the paper records that should have been thrown out years ago. For a time, our new shredder was as busy as it might have been in federal government offices during the Iran-Contra scandal.

Though getting rid of the paper pleased me, I find a certain irony in yet another use of technology: it accomplished a task that I did not think we needed a machine to do.

Then, in a paroxysm of further activity, Emily chose objects to be discarded. Suitcases, bags, tables, hampers, wrappings, videotapes, old printers and computers, and books, books, books made an impressive pile in our dining room on their way to the front porch and then the curb.

Ultimately, to our relief, some of this material would be picked up by the Big Brother Organization, while other stuff would be cremated in the city dump.

Emily also displayed refined political skills in getting her mother and father to agree with the decision to ditch each item selected. Whenever we expressed reluctance to throw out a given item, she backed off. She respected our refusal to dump some things that she, left to herself, considered disposable.

Like people who move their place of residence, this discovery of mounds of expendable stuff in our house has left my wife, Susan, and me reeling. Of course, we had already accused ourselves of having too much. But gazing on the piles revealed their horrifying immensity.

We now feel lighter, and relish knowing that the attic is less likely to cave in on our heads. And our fears that parts of our very identity would be going out in the trash have proven unfounded.

That I should have been party to the accumulation of excess property clashes with my life style in earlier adulthood. Then, I practiced poverty. In fact, this monastic tradition formed a basic part of my daily existence and I prided myself on not having any possessions of my own.

At least, I did so in the early days, those of my first fervor, when obeying the Jesuit rule meant being scrupulous about the smallest things I used. That was the era when I asked permission for every single razor blade received.

The theory behind this austere approach to daily life saw a tension between having material things and searching for God. Like other religious traditions, mine maintained that love for earthly passions would block your commitment to the spiritual life.  

Part of my mid-life transmission to the so-called “real world” involved discovering how easy it is to accumulate possessions, even things of no earthly use. When my monastic orientation began to wear off, I gradually learned how to acquire more things that I would ever need.

We Americans are awfully good at acquisition. But it comes at a price, both monetary and psychic. Almost every middle-class household lies cluttered with a lot more baggage than can be defended as good for us.

Our daughter has left behind a heap of materials ready for disposal. She has also left her parents feeling happy to be relieved of excess baggage. And she has given us a further sign that she cares about us.

If one never ceases to be a parent, our offspring never stop being daughters and sons. In this instance, our daughter has reached out to her relatively aged parents and unburdened us of burdensome stuff. And she has done so before an era sets in when we might have be threatened with moving away from our home.

Even after the purge, we are not now living like St. Francis of Assisi, nor even Henry David Thoreau. Our possessions are still sufficient to fill much of the house. But we feel lighter toward things and closer as a family.

Perhaps we will call upon Emily for another clutter session in the not so distant future. Meantime, maybe she can find an author to write an innovative book about growing older with less, and enjoying it more.

Richard Griffin

“A hope is not a plan,” economist Ben Stein is fond of repeating. Baby boomers who confuse the two are in for big trouble as they approach retirement, according to this commentator.

And that means a whole lot of people may share in this trouble. Of the total United States population, nearly one-third, or 77.5 million, were born between 1946 and 1964 and thus qualify for the baby boomer title.

Everyone acknowledges that this group is characterized by wide differences in social characteristics. However, experts also see them as holding one trait in common.

Dr. Robert Butler expresses it this way: “Despite its wide-sweeping diversity, it has one striking characteristic─the lack of preparedness for its longevity.”

An important part of the boomers’ unpreparedness is financial. They have saved altogether few dollars for their later life. And “they seem unaware,” writes Butler, “of the reality of rising medical costs and health issues they face.”

Butler’s remarks could have served as introduction to a recent conference held at MIT’s AgeLab. There all of the presenters stressed the need for this huge population wave just now reaching their 60s to start planning.

Joe Coughlin, founding director of the AgeLab, has a name for the situation: he calls it the Longevity Paradox. That paradox is rooted in the startling increase in average life expectancy over the past century. For Americans in 1900, average life expectancy was under 50; now it has risen to the later 70s.

Professor Coughlin sees the issues raised by the extra years of life as far-reaching. “Longevity is now something that is an endless frontier for us on a personal level, on a public level, and on a research level,” he says.

Most people, it turns out, underestimate the number of years they may live after retirement. It can be hard to believe that you will hit 90, but it happens to more and more of us.

The question whether finances will stretch to cover the extra years should ideally form a basic part of planning. But, among family members, “there is little or no communication on financial issues,” says John Diehl of The Hartford. This insurance company, in business almost 200 years, collaborated with the AgeLab in the conference.

“Financial planning tends to be the third rail of marriage,” adds Coughlin. Getting people to talk about realistic expectations of future income and expenses looms large among the goals of retirement planners like those in the audience at MIT.

Other commentators on the panel saw two special hazards for couples looking toward the future. One is favoring their children over themselves in the allocation of available money. That means, for example, parents impoverishing themselves to put their children through college.

Ben Stein quoted a retort made by Ronald Reagan to advocates favoring posterity. “What has posterity ever done for me?” asked the then president, perhaps reverting to show biz style.

More moderately, Coughlin observes that boomers “fawn over their children as never before.”

A second hazard applies specifically to women. Most likely, they will eventually find themselves in a care giving role within their immediate or extended family. In this often difficult situation they may be tempted to quit their job outside the home.

This move would endanger their earning power and chances for advancement, says Maureen Mohyde, a corporate gerontologist on the staff of The Hartford. She strongly advices against it.

A more subtle problem comes from the lifestyle adopted by many boomers. Enjoying better health and more affluence on the whole than people in earlier generations, these Americans often suffer from exaggerated expectations.

Joe Coughlin believes they expect more of everything. As a result, “they are going to find downshifting difficult,” he says. Probably, they should plan for that eventuality earlier than they do.

After all, the retirement prospect has changed notably from what it was a generation ago. Then, American institutions, especially big industries, provided relatively generous benefits to employees who had left the workplace at age 65.

But now, with the gradual disappearance of defined benefit plans and assured health coverage, retirees are left more to their own resources. For many, pensions no longer form the bedrock of their income after they have left the workplace.

Many people now thinking of leaving their jobs face a more complicate future than they might have earlier. They will probably have more choices but the downside will be more uncertainty.

A factor that, left to themselves, many people will ignore is inflation. Relative stability now, Ben Stein warns, should not lull us into thinking that inflation will remain in check. He foresees prices doubling over the next 25 years. Included in those increases will surely be the cost of health care.

As for consumer debt, no one could be found to say a good word for boomers in this bind. “If they have yuppified themselves with their credit cards, boy are they in trouble,” says Stein.

Richard Griffin

A supposedly true story tells of an elderly woman who was found dead in her bed one morning, pencil in hand and a just-finished crossword puzzle open before her.

Now, to longtime addicts like me, that’s the way to go.

Bill Clinton would presumably agree with this sentiment. So might comic Jon Stewart, documentary maker Ken Burns, and Yankee ace pitcher Mike Mussina. These four all appear in the recent film Wordplay, a movie that has delighted those addicted to these puzzles.

The former president uses a pen rather than a pencil. He’s that skilled. And he is fast as well. However, he has never faced the acid test of competing with others in the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

Last year’s competition, held in Stamford Connecticut, takes center place in Wordplay. The winner then was a 20-year-old RPI student. He beat out a man who, after making a mistake that may have cost him the prize, threw down his headphones and wept.

The fellow behind this tournament, and the crossword guru at the New York Times and NPR, is Will Shortz. He admits being a “pretty good solver” himself but he is not fast enough to enter the competition he founded.

But he serves as a connoisseur of the form. In the film he says: “A great puzzle is built on an original idea.” At the Times, he receives some 60 to 75 puzzle submissions every week.

Each year 110 different “constructors,” as Shortz calls puzzle creators, make up the crosswords. It’s an art requiring both adherence to a basic structure (one-sixth black spaces, for instance) along with ingenuity.  

In addition to the puzzles, he gets a lot of letters from crossword fans. “The best part of the week for me is reading the mail,” he tells watchers of the film. To my surprise, he acknowledges writing 75 percent of the clues himself.

Doing crossword puzzles has been a weekly, often daily, ritual in my household from the beginning. My wife, Susan, and I used to work on them together but that two-person approach soon proved not challenging enough. Now we do them separately though we much enjoy conferring with one another after finishing.

It comes as no insult to my male ego that my spouse is far better at this sport than I am. In fact, I enjoy seeing her skills at work. The only part of it that sometimes pains me is when she utters a subdued cry of satisfaction at getting the answer to a clue that is still baffling me. However, even then we try to avoid hurling cross words at one another.

One of the tournament winners in the film, Ellen Ripstein, says of doing crosswords: “It’s kind of a nerdy thing.” I don’t agree with this and take it as a personal slur. The two members of my household are not nerds, unless this word indicates well-balanced older adults ready to take on the world.

My spouse and I do not cultivate the crossword habit for therapeutic reasons. We are closer to Bill Clinton’s crossword philosophy: “It’s fun.”   

However, many professionals in the field of aging recommend doing these puzzles for brain health. Paul Nussbaum, a neuropsychologist based in Pittsburgh, says: “In my opinion, provided crossword puzzles are novel and complex and not a rote and passive task to the person's brain, it is likely to result in increased brain reserve. I define that as brain health promoting!”

Frequent puzzle solving provides me with a source of endless fascination about the ways my brain works. Oftentimes, I find myself stuck, absolutely unable to find the answer to a clue. But the next time I pick up the puzzle, the answer appears obvious.

The passage of time, even a few hours, has worked the wonder of changing my mental outlook.

The same process will apply to the central motif behind the whole puzzle. When I first look at it, the puzzle strikes me as unsolvable, too difficult for the state of my knowledge. As I plunge into it, however, intelligibility gradually appears within grasp, much to my satisfaction.

This pleasure will seem minor, even effete, to the non-addict. But, to me, and I suspect to legions of fellow crossworders, it ranks among life’s best satisfactions.

I suppose it can be compared to birding. Those addicted to the latter activity often seem ready to swoon at having spotted a magenta-winged something or other, a discovery that would not elevate me anywhere close to ecstasy, but which serves the birding community as a source of rapture.

My delight in crossword breakthroughs comes against the backdrop of a slowing down in my ability to solve them. I must admit that it now takes me longer to complete puzzles than it used to. This change does not alarm me but it does require an adjustment.

However, a somewhat diminished facility offers its own prize. Achieving the solution often delivers a satisfaction greater than before.

Richard Griffin

A favorite cousin has called to share news of emerging from a depression. Lasting several months, it was a crushing experience for this usually vibrant personality, now in her mid 80s. She reports herself returned back to her old self, ready to resume normal activities.

Two longtime friends, both widows and my juniors by some years, have fallen in love with men who have unexpectedly come into their lives, and one of them has announced plans to marry. It is infectious to see them embracing renewed life with the enthusiasm of youngsters. Along with other friends, I feel buoyed up by their good fortune.

In joining a new community of faith, another woman friend has brought joy to many of her friends, me among them. This development in her spiritual life is the action of a person who continues her search for light and peace.

As Christmas approaches, these are events in my domestic world of family and friends that strike me as manifesting the spirit of the season. These are all people who have found renewed life through these instances of grace.

On a wider stage, the Amish families who, last October, forgave the man who shot down five Amish children and reached out with help for his widow and children. Moved by compassion for those bound by family ties to the murderer, they transformed the unspeakable event into redemptive love.

Stephen J. Morgan, a journalist familiar with Lancaster County, has written of the Amish: “As people who know the Bible, they know well not only the long dark corridors of the human heart, but its capacity for forgiveness.”

If I look for such moments of grace, it is in part a defense against the negative influences of our contemporary world. Nationally, this is the winter of our discontent, in large part because of the war in Iraq, so disastrous for us Americans and incomparably more so for the people of that country.

This year has also brought books from writers who deserve to be numbered among the “cultured despisers of religion.” For them, religion is not only illusion but harmful. One of them, Christopher Hitchens, says it all on the cover of a book to be published next spring. He entitles it: “god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.”

I find this latter assertion both offensive and ignorant. It surprises me that people whose thoughts about religion seem mired in the 19th century are given such a wide hearing. In their own way they are almost as dogmatic in their atheism and scorn of religion as are fanatic religionists.

Critics like Hitchens show themselves tone deaf to the mystical dimensions of life, the poetry contained in religious teaching, and the hope that religion offers.

For me, Christmas contains all these three in abundance ─ mysticism, poetry, and hope. Among other things, it can be seen as a celebration of our own birth and that of every other person. In the light of this event, the indignity done to human beings throughout the world─assault, torture, slavery ─seems even more repugnant.  

The birth of Jesus, prayerfully contemplated, causes many spiritual seekers to wonder at the mystery of it all. And yet it carries this mystery in the midst of ordinariness

The scene at Christmas is also a kind of poetry. The cast of characters shown at the crib ─ the infant, his parents, the shepherds, the angels, and, ultimately, the three kings ─ give fanciful expression to emotions provoked by the birth of a child .

This latter set of emotions holds center place in this year’s Christmas letter from my friend Frank in Kalamazoo. “Awesome” is the word he chooses to express his feeling at the birth of his granddaughter Sofia Marie. “I don’t know of anything more awesome than the birth of a child─nothing,” writes my theologian friend.

In his letter of 2004, Frank had one complaint about Christmas: it doesn’t tell him much about being old. Of the beginnings of life, this event speaks eloquently. It celebrates important things, he says, like poverty and smallness. And it lifts up important people, not CEOs, but shepherds and the Magi from the East.

But the gospels say precious little about old age. “There are times,” Frank writes, “when I think one of the limitations of the gospels is that there is lots of good news for people up to about thirty, but not much for the geezers.” (This latter term is his, not mine.)

For me, however, inspiration remains in Christmas, the sense of a moment that transcends chronology. From childhood celebrations of this day I received a palpable sense of God’s goodness. The gifts received then, and other rites of the day, taught me feelings of awe, reverence, and love.

And the time felt holy, filled with the presence of something different. For me, this was and remains more than human time.

Richard Griffin

What if Thucydides, the great Greek historian of the 5th century B.C., had lived into his 90th year, and, before he died, was called upon to share with a large crowd of his fellow Athenians his thoughts on history?

How about imaging a similar scene, in the early second century A.D., featuring the wisdom of Tacitus, one of the greatest Roman historians? In this vision, he would be brought into one of the Roman amphitheaters to talk with interested citizens about the art of history and his appraisal of the condition of the empire.

These fantasies came to my mind as I listened to the historian Arthur Schlesinger, who was born in 1917, the same year as John F. Kennedy whom he served as an advisor and speechwriter in the White House. My imagined parallels with the greatest historians of classical times admittedly do not fit exactly, but this recent scene was certainly dramatic and moving for some of us Americans now, as the two others scenarios would surely have been for citizens of Greece and Rome.

Sitting in a wheelchair in the auditorium at the Kennedy Library, Schlesinger had listened to a panel discussion in which three of his younger colleagues praised him as an eminent model of the historian. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Sean Wilenz, and Alan Brinkley all had acknowledged their debt to him as an inspiration in their own careers.

Then the guest of honor was handed the microphone and, from his wheelchair, he delivered his reflections about both the art of history and the importance that a knowledge of history holds for our nation. He spoke in occasionally halting but nonetheless resolute voice, and his remarks were greeted by loud applause from a large and enthusiastic audience.

This is the man who inherited the vocation of his father, also a historian bearing the same name. Like his father, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. taught at Harvard. After serving in the Kennedy administration, he returned to scholarship. In the course of his career, he  wrote some highly significant books about major figures in American life, notably a 1957-1960 three-volume work on Franklin Roosevelt. Much earlier, in 1945, he had crafted a book about Andrew Jackson and portrayed him as one of the greatest agents of change in the presidency.

Speaking about his area of study, Schlesinger said: “History is to the nation as memory is to the individual.”  Amplifying this conviction, he added: “As persons deprived of memory become disoriented and lost, not knowing where they have been and where they are going, so a nation, denied a conception of the past, will be disabled and delinked with its present.”

He quoted Winston Churchill: “The longer you look back, the further you can look forward.” Nonetheless, historians suffer from limitations like those of other people, unable “to seize on absolute truth” but always needing to revise the conceptions of the past.

For Americans, history is even more important because of our dominance in the world. “I believe history is a moral necessity,” said Schlesinger, “for a nation possessed of overweening power. It is the best antidote to the delusions of power.”

History can lead to self-knowledge and “self knowledge is the indispensable prelude to self-control, for the nation as well as for the individual. It should strengthen us to resist pressure to convert momentary impulses into moral absolutes.”

Turning to our country’s current situation, Schlesinger recalled a previous example of foolish action. “Vietnam was hopeless enough,” he said, “and to repeat the same arrogant folly 30 years later is a gross instance of national stupidity.”

Still, this man of experience remains hopeful. Maybe we Americans can learn from the past how to use our power. “Let’s not bully our way through life,” he advises, “but let a growing sense of history temper our use of that power.”

As for the study of history: “This is the excitement of historical writing,” Schlesinger concludes, “the search to reconstruct what went before, the quest to be illuminated by those ever changing prisms that continually place old questions in a new light.”

Wisdom, many of us have discovered, does not automatically come with late life. By itself, age cannot make us any wiser than we were as young adults. Experience alone does not suffice; as Catherine Bateson reminds us, if you wish to grasp wisdom you must combine experience with reflection.

That’s what makes me appreciate Arthur Schlesinger. He draws lessons from history. Admittedly, this practice is not fashionable; in fact, some historians will tell you it is invalid. But, as a non-scholar generalist, I value applying historical experience to current problems.

Yes, the Vietnam War and the Iraq War differ. But there are resemblances that count for something. A lack of good judgment on the part of our political leaders characterizes both. In alerting us to these parallels Arthur Schlesinger is a prophetic voice.

Richard Griffin