A man in his later years, riding his bicycle, gets slammed by a car. He is rushed to the hospital where doctors decide he must have his right leg amputated. We learn how he enters upon the long process of dealing with this loss as, after a while, he prepares to return to his apartment.

Thus begins “The Blow,” a short story by J. M. Coetzee in the June 27th issue of the New Yorker. The author, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, is a South African who writes with uncommon sensitivity about what it is like for an aging man, Paul Rayment, to cope with sudden radical disability.

The man’s first home care attendant proves unsuitable. The second woman, a recent immigrant from the Balkans, turns out to be supportive beyond what he could have imagined. Ultimately, this compatibility brings about surprising changes in him.

For fear of giving too much away, I stop the story here. But, if you want to know what’s it’s like to be in new and unexpected need in later life, I recommend reading it. One of the (many) best things about it is the subtle way that the man’s inner feelings shift as time wears on.

This superb fiction has a basis in real life, of course. That’s what makes it so compelling to read. It puts into imaginative form some of the same approach one of my favorite gurus takes when writing about the meaning of frailty in the lives of old people. This writer, Wendy Lustbader, bases her reflections on the work she has done with a wide variety of such men and women..

Envisioning becoming frail, she poses the question: “How will I let my caregivers know who I am?” That is the issue because, if the provider of my care does not go beyond surfaces, I will be for her only another little old lady or old man. I will simply be one more mouth to be fed or body to be pushed back to the bedroom.

But, if my helper does get to know me and allow herself to be known, perhaps I can preserve my real self. Then I will emerge as a real person capable of being known and even loved.

“Are there ways of becoming more as the body becomes less?” asks Lustbader. Answering her own question, she goes on: “There is a further worth awaiting us in remembering and contemplating, in thinking things over, in letting all that has been said and done assemble itself into something we can grasp.”

Although this looking inward may seem daunting, let me suggest that doing it can change your world. Lustbader would encourage anyone who is attracted by this prospect to “embrace our ultimate fragility” now, before it becomes necessary. Doing so will reveal the beauty of human life and its meaning.

This is where Coetzee’s short story ultimately leads. The man makes discoveries about himself that turn him into a different kind of person. The life that seemed at a dead end as a result of the sudden catastrophe now takes on new meaning.

Thus literary art succeeds in revealing something not commonly perceived or appreciated. It shows what can happen when people are thrown into unfamiliar circumstances that appear only dire. With an effort on both sides, the direness can become transformed into one of the most valuable experiences of one’s whole life.

But the situation is not without challenges. When, as happens most of the time, family members are the ones who care for those who are frail, they may need to improve relationships that have been marred by remoteness or tension. Lustbader tells of a son who was pressed into service lifting his father from bed to wheelchair. They had not been on speaking terms for years, but when he had to embrace his father to make the transfer, the son broke into tears and so did his father, too.

When care comes from professionals outside the family, then the challenge may be different. Hired caregivers often differ in ethic origin or social class in ways that make it necessary for the frail person to adapt to unfamiliar styles of doing things. However, it is vitally important to break through toward respect for personal identity.

Some people, like the man in the story, have frailty thrust upon them suddenly, without warning. They have to adapt sooner than they ever expected.

By contrast, those of us in at least relatively good health have time to prepare ourselves for changes in our status. The best preparation, experience suggests, is to cultivate in ourselves an inner life that enables us to find meaning for what we may be called upon to go through.

Making time, in advance, for assembling within ourselves the various elements of our life can prepare us for diminishment to come. It is the old adventure of finding ourselves in new ways, much to our surprise and, perhaps, relief.

Richard

On the Fourth of July, four American soldiers, veterans of the war in Iraq, discussed their experiences. Appearing on public television, these young men offered a sober account of where things now stand.

“Two years into this war, this situation hasn’t improved,” said Specialist Patrick Resta.. Another, Sgt. Gregg Bumgardner, referring to the Iraqis, added: “They didn’t really want us there.”

Back home, when they meet civilians, the latter sometimes say: “Thank you for defending our country.” This sentiment has Bumgardner scratching his head in confusion because it can come from people opposed to the war.

These four men made a highly favorable impression on me. Their intelligence, obvious sincerity, and balanced realistic judgments suggest that the number of smart and capable non-commissioned officers in the American forces may be high.

That so many other soldiers like these have been killed or terribly wounded in body and/or soul continues to trouble me. I grieve when I see the names of the dead several times each week. My heart goes out to those families who have lost sons and daughters fighting in this war.

Equally afflicting is the fact that casualties are much greater among innocent Iraqis. It is one thing to die for a good cause; to fall victim to the lethal violence unleashed by modern weapons in a misbegotten war is something else.

An old friend, a native-born Iraqi Jesuit, provides a personal perspective on the agonizing warfare that continues to devastate his people and their land. Talking about it, he shakes his head in dismay at what is happening to his former countrymen, and to us.

Length of life provokes comparisons, I discover. Iraq drives me back in memory to Vietnam. Granted, these comparisons do not work exactly. You cannot easily apply the lessons of one complicated situation to another quite different one.

However, when it comes to war, what the comparisons do teach is the unexpected complications of armed conflict. You cannot count on things turning out as you expect: you are quite likely to be fooled, as the authors of the Iraqi invasion have been.

In my later life, I feel constant concern about what is happening to our country. Naiveté about the people of the world and ignorance of history, along with lack of interest in the subject, strike me as disabling handicaps for our nation. All too often our federal government adopts policies that embroil us in warfare, harming us as well as people of other countries. Anyone who has lived for more than a few decades knows that willful blindness can lead into dark and disastrous places.

War spawns the telling of lies, and our federal government has become accomplished at this activity. We are all suffering from repressive changes in our society that harm our national values without making us more safe. A constant barrage of propaganda is necessary to make us believe in the myths that are foisted on us for political advantage.

For my money, the journalist Chris Hedges has written more tellingly about contemporary war than anyone else. After covering warfare in at least ten different countries in the last three decades, he knows the subject at first hand.

In an interview published online by the Public Broadcasting System, Hedges speaks about the hidden costs of war:  “I'm not a pacifist. Wars are always tragic, but probably inevitable; I would think they are inevitable .  .   .  But I also understand what war can do, especially when you fall into the dark intoxication that war brings.

“That process of dehumanizing the other,” he continues, “that ecstatic euphoria in wartime, that use of patriotism as a form of self-glorification, that worshiping of the capacity to inflict violence — especially in a society that possesses a military as advanced as ours — all of those things I wanted to expose in the book, so that people would at least understand war for the poison that it is.”

Like Hedges, I am not a pacifist either. But, in my book, war can only be a last resort for the most pressing of reasons.

I will never forget the words of the British poet Wilfred Owen, killed in France one week before the armistice of 1918. Writing from the trenches, he bitterly quoted the Latin slogan “Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori” (It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country). He called this saying “the old lie.”  

These are the concerns of an aging columnist who increasingly worries about what is happening to our beloved country. When our government leads us into an unjustifiable war, it inflicts damage, boomerang-like, on ourselves as well as other people. I could wish for greater confidence that we will find our way out of this morass and reclaim the moral stature that we Americans have had at our best.

Richard Griffin

Contrasting news reports about two young men, one report astonishingly joyful, the other inexpressibly tragic, have moved me to ponder yet again some of the big issues in life.

The first young man, a 21-year-old named Patrick, was swept out to sea off Maui and feared lost. After some 15 hours of bobbing up and down in a life jacket, he was spotted by the crew of a Coast Guard helicopter and racheted up to safety. Patrick’s father heard the good news from the pilot of an airliner as he flew towards the Hawaiian Islands. There are no words to express the ecstatic relief that marked that day.

Paul, the second young man, graduated from Harvard College in June where he was celebrated for his intellectual gifts and vibrant personality. Late last month, he fell out of the sixth floor window of a New York City apartment where he had been sleeping. His death has devastated family and friends who loved and admired him. Like them, I find his loss cause for tears.

This unexpected rescue and this bizarre death draw from me amazement at the unequal outcomes in life. Why do some of us live so long while others disappear early on? It is enough to tempt me to endorse Shakespearean lines from King Lear memorized in college: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods / They kill us for their sport.”

But this grim sentiment does not come close to my considered philosophy. Even in the face of the world’s daily horrors, I continue to place great value on human life and believe in the ultimate power of love. Nor does my wonder at the great adventure dry up as the years accumulate.

In fact, the question, “Why am I still alive?” takes on renewed relevance with increased age. Already, I have been given 20 years more than my father had at his death. And many classmates in school and college have already died, while I still live.

The mystery of unequal lifespans urges further thought. When you find yourself outliving friends and family members, you sort out the reasons why it is worth living longer. As answers, it is tempting to offer various abstractions, in the manner of the philosophers.

Instead, let me suggest a much more simple and direct approach: You, like me, may be a spouse, parent, sibling, aunt or uncle, cousin, friend, neighbor, colleague. These roles count for more than we usually allow. When we depart finally, many of those on the other end of these relationships will miss us, thus affirming the value of these ties and the value of our life.

During a public dialogue with me four years ago, the scholar and writer Catherine Bateson gave a striking illustration of how important even one of these roles can be. Her mother, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, was one of the first people to write a living will. In it, she stipulated that, if she had suffered mental impairment or lost her mobility, she did not want anything done to extend her life.

This provision for her future angered Catherine, then a teenager, because her mother was saying that “it was not worth her while to be alive when she was no longer the famous Margaret Mead.” Catherine’s sharp response was: “But you’d still be my mother.”

You do not need to exercise all of the roles listed above to find meaning in your life.  Even one of them can make a vital difference to you and to others. Parenthood, for instance: even when children have become fully adult, the relationship continues to be a support for sons and daughters, and ourselves.

Ideally, ties to family members and friends take on greater meaning as we age. Maturity has brought many of us to realize the value in being connected to others. Though they would no doubt retort that they do not need my pity, I tend to feel badly for the few misanthropic figures encountered in my neighborhood. Almost inevitably, as I see it, old age will leave them exposed to soulful melancholy, if not acute vulnerability.

Let me mention the neighbor’s role, one that is commonly undervalued. I do not blush to ask my own neighbors for favors that compensate for my deficiencies of body and mind. These chores range from screwing in a new light bulb in a porch roof, to advice about how to get my computer back online after some mysterious failure of connections.

By the same token, I take pleasure in offering to neighbors whatever talents might help them. Several times a year, I publish a neighborhood newsletter that is enriched by the varied talents of local residents. More significant, perhaps, when neighbors are away, I am ready to move their cars on our city’s dreaded street cleaning days.

Serving as spouse, parent, sibling, uncle or aunt, cousin, friend, neighbor, colleague ──not the worst of responses to life’s unsolvable mysteries.

Richard Griffin

The sacred smell remains with me in memory, that of the incense as it rose from the altar and wafted its way through the church. During the rite we called Benediction, the priest would swing the golden vessel on its golden chain, toward the Blessed Sacrament as a way of worshiping the Lord. That burning aromatic substance inside the vessel made the building feel even more holy than usual, suffusing the structure where the spiritual life of my boyhood found its focus.

The parish is no more, having been suppressed last year by the archbishop for lack of attenders and a dearth of clergy. But there is no suppressing my 1930s and 1940s memories of the place, with its Latin language liturgies, its pews crowded with families dressed in their Sunday best, and familiar hymns, features of a church flourishing with faith and practice.

The pastor and his curates, their backs turned toward us as they recited the parts of the Mass, showed themselves reverent but businesslike in getting through the rite in time for the next congregation to enter. Those of us receiving holy communion would be hungry and thirsty, when we thought about it, in accordance with fasting rules then in force.

The day of my First Communion, May 31, 1936, stands out as altogether special. At age seven, the age of reason as the church defined it, I qualified for this event, which was followed by a parish breakfast served to us amid much rejoicing. In recalling the occasion here, I have before me a photo of my second grade public school class. My mother wrote all our names on the back, with an asterisk noting those who had received this First Communion together.

Not lightly did we approach the altar rail that day: we had prepared for it over a period of months. That meant studying our catechism, memorizing the answers to questions familiar to virtually all members of our faith community. Preparation also entailed our first confession, as we were shown our way into the dark box where a priest was waiting for us to tell him our sins. I don’t remember any of the awful deeds I shared with the confessor that day.

The boys among us wore white suits, and white shoes and socks. The little girls wore white dresses and veils.

No enfants terribles were among us that day, because all of us were shriven and pure as newly bought sheets of paper. As we approached the altar rail in awe, not without fear of making a mistake, the priest placed the host on our tongues and we returned to our pews united with the Lord Jesus. The emotion of that day has remained in my memory for 70 years, suggesting that the parish was making a durable investment in its boys and girls.

Church in those days was much more than Sunday Mass. Devotions, too, loomed large in parish life, rites like the already mentioned Benediction and confession. Some adult parishioners confessed every week even if they had no axe murders or other heinous sins to accuse themselves of. Pushed by our parents, we children would be there, too, prepared to divulge our transgressions. As I entered adolescence, my most pressing spiritual danger tended to be the photos of women in Life Magazine or the National Geographic, scandalously revealing according to the standards of the day.

Novenas enjoyed great popularity, too, those nine-day sessions of prayer, hymn singing, sermons, and Benediction. Each March, we prayed and sang to Saint Francis Xavier, the 16th century Jesuit who had baptized thousands of Asians as one of the first of his order’s missionaries.

At one stage, the saint’s arm made the rounds of parishes, in a glass case that displayed the sacred limb that long before had brought so many people into the church. Singing the hymns, smelling the incense, listening to the words of Scripture and the visiting preachers, all gave this young boy a palpable sense of what it meant to be in touch with the holy.

But nothing stays the same. People change, along with their institutions. Long life exposes us to shifts in thinking, in taste, and in the way things are done. You find that what seemed fixed in place was not nearly so immutable as you thought. As the ancient Greek philosopher knew, it is impossible to put your foot into the same flowing river twice.

In retrospect, it surprises me that the Catholic subculture held together so tenaciously. That way of being religious felt to me, my parents, and just about everybody else in my circle of friends remarkably stable, immune to the winds of change that would transform it decades later. Of course, in time I would become aware of Catholic provincialism and worse defects, but in my boyhood it all seemed as if it all could last forever.

Richard Griffin

An Arlington reader, who is also a longtime friend, has written urging me to “feature some seniors who are active in more international efforts, not officials, but ordinary people who are looking beyond the U.S., making a difference in alleviating the absolutely dire poverty in places such as Africa.”

I welcome this suggestion and believe that such older volunteers deserve  admiration. Among them are friends and neighbors whom I feel privileged to know. No one of them works in an African country, but what they do for impoverished people in Haiti and two Central American nations merits attention.

This is the fourth winter that Bill and Linda Green, a married couple who live on my block, have spent three months in Guatemala serving residents of one of the poorest regions of that country. To describe their work I have relied on an article written for The Howl, the amateur rag I publish for people in my neighborhood.

Bill, a retired physician, locates the work they do in the central region along the shore of Lago Atitlan, one of the world’s most beautiful lakes. He and his wife Linda, a social worker by profession, have engaged in varied activities on behalf of the local people..

Last winter, Bill saw patients four mornings a week at a local health center; he calls it “a very rewarding experience.” Linda, for her part, assisted teachers of English in the city of Panajachel, and did some therapy and consultation. Together, Linda and Bill interviewed ten non-governmental organizations to investigate “women’s reproductive health and family planning in the indigenous towns around the lake.”

Another couple, Margaret and David Gullette, whom I have known for many years, spend part of each winter serving the people of San Juan del Sur in Nicaragua.  

Margaret, a writer on cultural issues, raises money to support a literacy project for women. Collaborating with two woman physicians, one Belgian, the other Nicaraguan, she has established learning centers that include a free high school for adults, a Saturday school that has enrolled 350 people, and 21 satellite schools in rural areas near San Juan.

David has helped build or reconstruct a school each year, resulting in a total of 17 thus far. The work has attracted students and teachers, along with hundreds of visitors from Newton, which since 1988 has been paired with San Juan as a sister city.

About her work with grown-ups Margaret says: “It gives adults a second chance; it’s like a mission.” David adds: “It has transformed my life; it has been a great midlife gift to us.”

I recommend the project’s web site: www.newtonsanjuan.org.

Another woman who lives on my block, Betty Mahan, has been devoted to good works in Haiti for many years. She buys hand-crafted cards with her own money, has them brought to the United States with the help of various informal contacts, sells the cards, and then gives the money back to the Saint Boniface Haiti Foundation. Founded in 1983 by the parishioners of St.Boniface Church in Quincy, this nonprofit works to serve “the poorest of the poor.”

My neighbor Betty sees her own work as “only a small portion of many in the St. Boniface group with whom God has shared the desperate needs and sufferings of his Haiti children.” This group raised the money to build a hospital in Fond des Blancs that provides the only source of health care for a community of 45,000 rural poor.

Even though she can no longer go to their country, her work on behalf of Haitians strikes me as enterprising and valuable. She manages to raise the consciousness of many Americans, especially those in the parish churches where her cards are sold. Thus she provides an object lesson for those of us unable to volunteer our services on the ground in poor countries.

If I personally know three people living on the same city block with me, there must be a large number of the retired and my age peers who contribute services to residents of other countries. And they must be engaged in a wide variety of activities, some highly professional, others more informal, but all valuable both for the people they serve and for themselves.

Ultimately, efforts of the kind described here, though essential, cannot ever be sufficient to solve the poverty of so many of the world’s people. Every day, an estimated 30 thousand children die from causes that good nutrition and health care could remedy. This situation continues to be a scandal that only governments have the means to resolve.

In a speech at this year’s Boston College commencement, Paul Farmer, the Harvard physician who has become well known for his work with the poor of Haiti and elsewhere, defined hell on earth as “poverty and violence and untreated disease.” Thankfully, many of my age peers have risen up and dedicated themselves to fighting the fires of this hell.

Richard Griffin

“Baseball satisfies people who are seeking some order in their lives. Fiction is another attempt to impose order on chaos.”

This is the way the celebrated novelist, short story artist, and critic John Updike compares baseball to writing. Now 73, with hair turned white above his craggy profile, Updike (like many another) has grown into better looks in later life than he had when young.

The setting where he made the comparison was a perfect fit for the subject. Updike was sitting on a platform with four other writers, high in the sky above home plate at Fenway Park. Taking advantage of the Red Sox playing away in St. Louis, PEN New England (the writers’ group) had staged a forum featuring Roger Angell, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen King, and Michael Lewis, along with Updike, to talk about baseball and writing, and the connection between the two.

It felt idyllic to sit among hundreds of fans in the 406 Club, high atop home plate,  and look out over the playerless field at night. The Pesky Pole in right field looked close enough to touch, and the many corporate signs scattered throughout the surfaces formed a patchwork quilt. At one point, a dark cloudbank full of potential rain moved across the sky, like a fit of pessimism about the home team’s chances for another championship.

The authors joined in celebrating the beauties of the game, as all five have done in their published work. Another writer, not part of the panel but connected by blood with the home team, Leslie Epstein (his son is the wunderkind general manager of the Red Sox), touched on the perils of losing oneself in the emotions of a crowd of joyful, rabid fans.

That discordant comment would become part of a subtext for the evening, beneath a dreamy surface of nostalgia for the game. Ultimately, that underlying theme would prove for me the most provocative part of the event.

Doris Kearns Goodwin sees her career as historian rooted in her childhood, when she would report to her father the results of the day’s Brooklyn Dodgers’ games after he came home from work. At first, she would blurt out the final score, but in time she learned better. In the process, she discovered that she had to tell a story “from the beginning, to the middle and the end.”

Roger Angell credits his father with forging his love of baseball. “Father made me feel at home in the ballpark,” recalls this now 85-year-old New Yorker writer. Since his father was born in 1889, the lives of this father and son span almost the whole history of the game.

Stephen King’s personal link with the game was through his mother. She worked in a Stratford, Connecticut, laundry, the only white woman there. All the workers rooted for the Dodgers because of Jackie Robinson, the man who broke baseball’s color barrier. King’s mother also read to him on summer nights, but she herself was absorbed by Gone With the Wind. This popular classic, with its 1040 pages, prompted her son to ask how long a book could be.

Her answer, “as long as you want it to be,” reminds the popular novelist of baseball. This game can go into extra innings; until you make three outs, you are always up. Similarly, for King, writers “do it until it’s done, until we are satisfied.”

Michael Lewis finds that “baseball is very clean for the writer.” By contrast with other sports, “it’s easy to assign credit and blame, the confrontations end to be either man versus man, man versus fly ball, etc. It’s more transparent.”

Half way through this nostalgia-laced group exchange, Stephen King suddenly asked: “Why is almost every face white here?” The question led to a discussion of why relatively few black people attend Red Sox games. An African American member of the audience rose to answer: because of blacks’ resentment of white people who judge black athletes as simply gifted by nature with great skills, and fail to appreciate the hard work that has gone into their success on the ball field.

Later, Ms.Goodwin criticized major league baseball for the way players are constantly leaving their teams for others that will pay them more money. Even more serious, some teams in small money markets year after year have no realistic hope of making the playoffs.

These and other reasons have made me sour on the game that I used to love uncritically. Money and hype have become such dominant factors in the big leagues that I feel alienated and have not attended a Red Sox game in years.

At the forum’s end I buttonholed both Doris Kearns Goodwin and John Updike and got them to admit that some of the romance has gone out of the game for them also. But I doubt either would have said so in the forum itself, an admission that might have spoiled an atmosphere so worshipful of the game.

Richard Griffin

When I heard the learned numbers man talk about Social Security, I might have wondered what all the fuss had been about. He did not even mention the president’s proposal for private accounts─something that struck me like ignoring the presence of an elephant in a small living room.

To hear Stephen Goss tell it, the job of chief actuary for Social Security brings him a lot of fun because it involves making guesses about the future. He describes his role as “not political at all,” but like that of a baseball umpire working behind the plate.

Goss was the chief speaker at a recent forum at UMass Boston. Professor Yung-Ping Chen, himself an expert on the subject, had asked the actuary to present the facts about the current Social Security situation. Predictably, the event attracted few young people, a further indication that this country’s youth do not see that the current debate has far more importance for them than for those already advanced in age

During the Chief Actuary’s presentation, I found little evidence that he takes seriously the fevered discussions about Social Security that have spread across America. To him, solving the problems of this crucial national program requires nothing more than clear-headed analysis and carefully calibrated responses.

In Goss’s view, our national pension system needs some tweaking, but not immediately. He believes Social Security to be basically sound: Not until 2017 will the benefits paid out exceed the amount of tax money coming in and not until 2041 will the system run out of tax funds. Goss does, however, allow that certain problems will require Congress to take action, sooner or later.

This expert on the numbers attributes the system’s prospective problems mainly to the drop in American birth rates. “If women were still giving birth to an average of 3.3 children, then there would be no problem,” he says. But by 1972, the birth rate had dropped to two children per family and remains at that level.

Various economic and social changes in American society have resulted in fewer children, especially among white people. The drop in births is not as great as in some other countries, notably Italy and other European nations; but this demographic change in the United States looms large enough to upset Social Security’s revenues.

Another point emphasized by Goss concerns the ratio between the number of workers who pay into the system and those who have retired and are currently drawing benefits. In 1975, there were 3.2 workers for every beneficiary, a ratio that he calls “extremely stable.”

To people who feel disturbed at today’s relatively low level of workers per beneficiary, Goss says that the inflated numbers during World War II have given them unrealistic expectations. He admits, however, that without major changes, the ratio will drop to only about two workers per beneficiary.

When the question of private accounts finally emerged in the question period, Goss’s  main response to this proposal was to say: “It depends how you do them.” He seemed to favor those plans that would be funded, not from the Social Security trust funds, but rather from the general treasury.

Again, you would not know from the chief actuary that values have much of anything to do with the current debate about the future of Social Security. He seemed content to detail the numbers as if crucial choices, many of them political in nature and reflecting fundamental ways of looking at the world, had no part to play in the national discussion about changes in the system.

Yes, he laid out some of the possible choices: you can lower benefit levels, raise tax rates, increase the taxable maximum, include those public employees currently not participating in the system. And, ultimately, I suppose he would add private accounts.

But he paid little attention to the human meaning of the choices. To me, the decisions ought to reflect the values that Americans consider important. And, given the divisions among us, these moves will not come easily.

For me, solidarity among old and young ranks high as a value. So does the responsibility of our government to take care of members of the community who cannot care for themselves. I support preferential options for the poor and for the disadvantaged to the extent that such options are feasible. And proposals to cut back on the Social Security income of us members of the middle class strike me as unfair, to say the least.

Schemes designed to establish private accounts, even when advanced under the euphemism of “personal accounts,” are ways of privatizing a system that should remain public in every part so that the general welfare can be best served.

The common good, not the welfare of Wall Street investment bankers, must remain the measuring stick when making changes in a system on which so many Americans depend for financial survival.

Richard Griffin