The garden in front of my neighbors’ house has been festooned for the past two weeks with rows of white lights. The short winter days have thus become a little less somber thanks to the brilliance of their decorations. When beheld at night, these lights raise my spirits in this season of Christmas 2004.

As usual, the glow of this celebration and coming of the year’s end prompt in me reflections about what we have experienced during the past twelve months. Casting my memory high and far, like a fishing line thrown into the water, I rediscover events of some consequence.

This past year has brought several surprises, some of them welcome. Among the latter I cannot omit the Red Sox becoming world champions of baseball.

Despite my pessimism about what has happened to the game on the major-league level and my Scrooge-like feelings of regretting that the Sox have lost their pretender status, I feel obliged to include their comeback against the Yankees and their sweep of the Cardinals as tops among the sports events of the year.

At the risk of seeming distressingly parochial, I also include the replacement of Bernard Law with Sean O’Malley as archbishop of Boston among the surprising and desirable events on the local scene.

It may not have loomed large in everybody’s life but, to me, this change came as highly desirable for my Church. Another welcome change came when the archbishop divested himself of the palatial residence at the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Lake Street in Brighton.

Acknowledging the difficulty of being an optimist in later life, I must also reckon with events that I could weep over. On the large stage, the election of George W. Bush strikes me as tragic for our nation and, indeed, for the world.

Yes, 59 million Americans do not agree with this appraisal of November’s vote, but they are wrong. What a nerve I have to disdain the judgment of so many of my fellow citizens! But, hey, there are some privileges that come with age.

Be that as it may, I now have to accept living what may turn out to be my last years under the shadow of a presidency that, on many fronts, I consider bad for us all, especially for those who are not rich.

Even more sobering was news coming from the United Nations this month. Across the world, more than one billion children are being denied a healthy and protected upbringing, with many of them slated to die from lack of food and water. That this situation is caused in large part by war should provoke tears.

Massachusetts made history this past year by authorizing same-gender marriages. I had the pleasure of taking part in the weddings of two sets of friends, one couple male, the other female. Though I still feel some discomfort at using the same word “marriage” for heterosexual and homosexual partners, I find spiritual value in such pairings. This I do contrary to the official attitudes of my Church.

The end of a 60-year friendship through the unexpected death of my friend Bob brought sadness to family and mutual friends this summer. However, the continued outpourings of esteem and affection for him have modified my feelings of loss.

Similarly, the death of my friend Daria at age 45 left me mourning, as it did many others in her wide circle of friends and acquaintances. I miss conversations with her about literature and spirituality, among other topics.

But I continue to value the blessings of  many other friends. Our weekly dinner group has now been gathering for almost 30 years and members show no signs of ceasing to enjoy frequent sharing of meals, conversation, concerns, and laughter.

Similarly, the book group to which I have belonged for some decades has continued to make choices that  members usually enjoy reading and discussing. This month, in order not to let Graham Greene’s centenary pass without notice, we read The Power and the Glory. Our lively and intense discussion proved to me that this novel has lost none of its force after more than 60 years.

As the year ends, I continue to feel grateful to my readers. Many of you have contacted me during this past year, as in other years, sharing your appreciation of my columns. Knowing that I have sometimes touched a chord in you is thoroughly gratifying and makes the effort of writing even more rewarding. I also appreciate the critical remarks of readers, even when they are not music to my ears.

As I join with family and friends in various celebrations of Christmas 2004 and New Year 2005, season brings a renewal of hope, offsetting some of the negative events of the year past and suggesting that some welcome events will set the tone for the year to come.

Richard Griffin

About Christmas, my friend Frank has only one problem. As he views it, this event tells us more about the beginnings of life than about the later stages.

Contemplating Christmas, my friend interprets it as saying something important about smallness and poverty, about what is truly important and what is not. “I love this feast,” he says, “but it doesn’t tell me much about being old.”

These themes emerge in Frank’s annual letter that he writes from Kalamazoo, where he lives with his wife Toni. With his recent birthday putting him at the three-quarters of a century mark, he ponders more and more what his advancing age means.

With typical provocativeness, Frank seems to hold it against Jesus that he died so young. “I am wondering what Jesus would have been like,” he writes, “if he had gotten to be seventy-five like me.” Of what he has learned in recent decades he says: “I didn’t know that when I was thirty and I don’t think Jesus did either.”

This issue reminds me of a passage in Fifth Business, a 1970 novel written by the late Canadian author Robertson Davies. His narrator meets a Jesuit scholar, Padre Ignacio Blazon, who has strong and hardly orthodox opinions about Jesus. Thay go like this:

“The older I grow, the less Christ’s teaching says to me. I am sometimes very conscious that I am following the path of a leader who died when He was less than half as old as I am now. I see and feel things that He never saw or felt. I know things He seems never to have known. Everybody wants a Christ for himself and those who think like him. Very well, am I at fault for wanting a Christ who will show me how to be an old man?”

My friend Frank would surely not go this far, nor in real life would any Jesuit I know. But Frank has raised a question worth thinking about: how does a person growing old learn from a spiritual tradition that puts emphasis on the young?

Or, as he puts it in his own distinctive language, “There are times 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.”

What Frank loves about growing older are the new insights and discoveries that open up to him. Broadening his experience to include his age peers, he says: “Our lives never cease having new challenges in them we never dreamed of and, if we live to be old, we can learn things we never could have when we were young.”

Specifically, he has been studying Chinese religion and Buddhism in recent years. After mentioning other findings, he writes: “It has blown me away to discover that the position of the feminine in Chinese religion is clearly more fundamental to human living than the stuff of us males.”

He also finds himself now wondering “if there are not more Messiahs than my own beloved Saviour, more than one person who saw the shallowness of great deeds and the depth of being true to yourself.”

He also has come to see how what he once considered exclusive spiritual gifts are actually shared by people outside his own tradition. Among the mysteries of Christmas for him now is “the later insight on the part of us who, when we were young, thought we were the sole possessors of holiness, salvation, and the Kingdom of God.”

Being able to raise questions and receive insights like this are among the gifts that bring this vibrant correspondent from Kalamazoo “real joy in being old.”

Also contributing much to this joy is his wife Toni who, in the same mail, announces her retirement after 25 years as a psychotherapist. She will soon leave her work “for purely personal, life-transforming reasons.” It sounds as if hers will be a retirement graced by further growth, like that of her husband’s.

Among his other blessings, Frank cites the proximity of his two sons. They are both in their early married years, “each with an altogether remarkable woman,” according to this devoted father-in-law.

For fear I make it seem that everything is always upbeat with my friend, he would be the first to correct this. He speaks of himself as filled with “wisdom and forgetfulness, thinking clearly one day only to have the next day finding me with a head full of sawdust.”  

Nonetheless, “sitting here in this old bag of bones,” Frank wishes all his friends a joyful Christmas. And so do I wish you, my readers who celebrate this day, a blessed Christmas, filled with the grace of the event. For those who celebrate other special days, let me wish you also the best of health, and prosperity both physical and spiritual.

Richard Griffin

Turning the pages of a large book on the store’s table, I suddenly saw a photo of a woman I had known for the previous four years. This photo was one of a series taken of employees at Harvard University, with which I have been long associated. All of them pictured there had also been interviewed and an edited version of what they said about themselves and their work was also published.

When I glanced at my friend Rachel’s text, I felt the blood rush to my forehead. I could not believe what I was reading. All of a sudden, my world felt turned upside down. She was telling everyone something important that I had never known: she used to be a man.

Yes, she was tall and her voice rather deep. These personal characteristics might have served as clues for me, but that she had ever been a he had never occurred to me. The disorientation that I suddenly experienced made me, for a time, lose my psychic bearings. How could I have been fooled like this, I wondered?

Part of what felt to me like deception came from my knowledge that she was the single mother of a young boy, admittedly adopted, but now become her own son. From time to time she would share with me details of her son’s behavior and problems. Without ever questioning her background as a mother, I just assumed her to have been always maternal.

This marked the first time I had actually known anyone who has changed genders. I had read about Christine Jorgenson and other pioneering people who had made the leap, but never had I actually met a person like them. To me, it seemed almost unbelievable that I had been blind to a matter of such vital moment.

Ironically, in her printed interview Rachel argued that changing genders was a matter of little importance. For her, going from being a man to being a woman counted for hardly anything surprising. Though she admitted having been the object of harassment at earlier workplaces, she felt herself to have carried off the transition rather easily.

For me, however, this transformation amounted to a gigantic event. It went against all my categories, especially those that defined what it was to be a woman and what it was to be a man. My spiritual tradition has always placed great emphasis on the differences between the sexes, starting with Adam and Eve in the garden. Though I have never been fundamentalist in my thinking, I could never slough off this distinction with abandon.

I resolved then and there to continue treating my friend with respect and affection. Admittedly, I had to go against immediate emotions that inclined me to change my approach to her. I felt almost queasy about contact with someone who now looked to me decidedly different.

Fortunately, these feelings had dissipated by the time I next saw her. It was different now, but not so as to harm our friendship. Something in my mental world had changed, but my behavior had not. In fact, my inner world had been enlarged, quite to my amazement.

Before this experience, I had already encountered changes in my notions of family and community. Considerable contact with gay and lesbian people had taught me not only the fact of sexual diversity but, to my surprise, it value. Among other experiences, belonging to a liturgical community where such people worshipped along with my family and me had led to greater understanding and acceptance. Once gay and lesbian weddings became legal in Massachusetts, I would take part as a guest and congratulate the same-sex spouses as I would more conventional partners.

Still, I felt myself changing radically under the pressure of these events. They went against so much of what I had taken as certain. My upbringing had been quite sheltered: until reaching my early twenties, almost incredibly I did not even know that homosexuality existed. Then, after finding out, I had no contact with anyone avowedly gay or lesbian and my theological studies emphasized the sinfulness of that situation.

For a parallel in psychic change, I cite the experience of astronomers. Until the year 1919, those scientists all thought there to be only one galaxy, our Milky Way. Since then, they have come to know that there are some 140 billion other galaxies in the universe! And the roster of their further discoveries goes on without end.

To have discovered their world to have been too small to an almost infinite degree must have come as a tremendous shock. But, they will have admitted, an exciting one as well. In this other sphere, I too now find excitement in discovering how much more diverse the world of human beings is than I ever imagined.

In late life, perhaps I can apply to myself what Hamlet said to his friend: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Richard Griffin

“Where were you on the afternoon of December 7, 1941?” This question, posed by the narrator of “I Can Hear It Now,” introduces the cataclysmic event that took place 63 years ago this week.

Once more I have listened to one of the old LP recordings that recalls this history and brings it back excitingly. “We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin,” the voice announces, sharing with the American people the grim news of the Japanese attack on Pear Harbor.

We also hear President Franklin Roosevelt speak to a joint session of congress on December 8th as he brands the day of the attack “a date that will live in infamy.” At the same time, he boldly predicts: “We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.”

In answer to the question at the top of this column, I must reply: “In my room, banished there for bad behavior.” Then a 13-year-old adolescent, I was being punished by my father for an offence long since forgotten.

To console myself, I had turned on the radio and thus was the first in my family to hear the fateful news. Immediately I bolted out of banishment, ran downstairs and breathlessly announced the Pearl Harbor events to my parents. In the emotion of the moment my misbehavior appeared petty and I was free, my punishment forgotten.

My father, a writer for the Boston Post, realized at once the implications of the surprise attack. It would bring us into a new era of history and change the lives of all Americans. Following his lead, the mood of other family members turned somber as we envisioned the effects on us of our country being at war.

Roosevelt’s confidence on the next day improved the morale of just about everyone. However, most of us did not realize the extent of the destruction that rained down on the American fleet. It took boldness on Roosevelt’s part to predict victory when American military preparedness was so feeble. Then, a few weeks later, when we took on the other major powers in the Axis –  – Germany and Italy –  –  the challenge became even more daunting.

My age exempted me from the military service into which so many fellow Americans were drafted or enlisted. In any event, I would never have been accepted for the armed forces because of a disability dating from my birth. Thus my experience of war would remain second-hand, gained through the media (though we did not then use this word).

Habitually I would read with rabid interest newspaper accounts of the fighting in both the Pacific theater and the European. In addition I saw movies that presented the enemy in almost exclusively negative images.

I still remember pilots of the Japanese Zero fighter planes, grinning as they shot down American defenders. And the deadly comic portrait of Hitler as portrayed by Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator made an indelible impression on me.

Like almost all other Americans, I was wholeheartedly supportive of the war effort. Long after that war had ended, I discovered that my friend, the scholar Gordon Zahn, and some few others had registered as conscientious objectors and were confined to a camp in New Hampshire. But they would have struck me as weird in opposing a war that seemed amply justified.

Only much later, as an adult, did I develop a political consciousness that prepared me to take a critical view of some actions of our national government. That shift in awareness ranks as one of the most significant developments in my interior life.

Living in international communities was a chief factor in bringing about this transformation. My year in Wales with colleagues from a variety of European countries made me see my own country in a different perspective. Even more did the following year in Belgium where I studied with people from Africa, South America and other places.

Entering into their worldview, I came to evaluate the actions of the United States government more critically. That shift in perspective would become most evident during the Vietnam War. Like so many others, I felt stricken by the tragic mistakes of our leaders in that agonizing time of struggle.

Tracing the physical events in one’s life usually does not present great difficulty. Recognizing the shifts in consciousness is much more difficult. Unless you have documented those shifts or can call on the observations of friends, recalling how your psyche has changed is a challenge.

My shifts in outlook from that nationally traumatic December 7th go far to make up the story of my life. Thanks to journals and other writings, I have been able to put together at least a fragmentary account of inner changes to accompany the ones that happened in full view.

To have been given enough length of days for giving expression to that story continues to gladden my heart.

Richard Griffin

Since you are reading this column, chances are that you love newspapers. If so, you and I have something important in common.

From my earliest days I have been fascinated by publications that deliver the news of the world, whether of my immediate environs or of far-flung places.  Perhaps it was growing up in a family in which my father was a reporter and then an editor.

On occasion, he would take me to visit his office at the Boston Post and we would walk through the plant where I gaped with awe as the giant presses rolled out thousands of printed papers.

Though nowadays, like my so many of my juniors , I frequently consult the online versions of newspapers, that never satisfies me. Holding the actual newsprint in my hands and turning the pages gives me a tactile experience that I continue to relish. To me, the printed page is a work of art, at its best the product of imagination and inventiveness, and I enjoy handling it.

What prompts these reflections is a recent talk by Daniel Okrent, the so-called Public Editor of the New York Times. His job, sometimes described as the hardest in journalism, is what other newspapers call the ombudsman. He has been hired to represent the readers and to write criticism of the paper when he thinks it is called for.

The New York Times has 1200 employees in its newsroom. Though it is not America’s largest paper by circulation, it sells more than a million copies each day, though nowadays more people read it on line than on paper.

The Times prints an astounding total of a million words each week. (By contrast, Time Magazine prints only fifty thousand.)

These figures suggest the scale on which this famous newspaper operates. It is read all over the world and is renowned for being the paper of record.

Another indication of the Time’s reach is suggested by the experience of Tom Friedman, one of its leading columnists. After he began to list his email address with his column, he received 8,000 messages in three days, after which, in a gesture of self-preservation, he stopped divulging his electronic address.

Now, however, he answers every piece of snail mail he receives, honoring the trouble taken by anyone who writes a message on a piece of paper and bothers to address an envelope.

Daniel Okrent himself receives 450 pieces of mail a day, of which about a hundred require an answer. The biggest complaint he gets about the Times is “Your writing is for rich people.” People accuse the paper of catering to one social class and giving short shrift to others.

Times writers get a lot of abuse from readers. Some of the public send what Okrent calls “vile stuff” to the newspaper, especially to the women writers. The latent violence in American society finds expression in the ranting of readers who indulge in newsprint rage.

It’s also part of Okrent’s job to identify errors, of which there are inevitably a considerable number each day. The philosophy he expresses−“admitting error is a way of enhancing credibility”−motivates this fact-finding activity.

The most difficult journalistic issue that the Public Editor deals with is sourcing. Among other responsibilities, journalists must make sure that the information they report is accurate. When quoting people, they must take pains to do so correctly and see to it that the context is also established properly.

The Times continues to be “wounded” by the Jayson Blair event of last year. On that occasion, a young reporter faked stories, falsely claiming that they were eyewitness reports. It was the main factor that led the executive editor at the Times to resign, and this scandal is still used to discredit the paper.

The Public Editor did not mention one of the features that I most value– crossword puzzles. Doing the Sunday crossword, and the every-other-week double acrostic, has long been a sacred ritual in my household. Fortunately for me, my wife and I do not compete because she is much sharper than I and finishes the puzzles faster.

But the Times, fascinating as it is, could never satisfy the needs of the true newspaper addict. The local press gives evidence of hard work and journalistic skill, and touches our daily lives in important ways. The person who reads only national publications is like the one who votes only in national elections.

Sometimes the press exists on a truly micro level. Looking back to adolescence when I was editor of The Walrus, our school newspaper, I value my apprenticeship in putting news together in readable form. With our own twist, we informed our fellow students, faculty members, and everyone else in our community about what was going on.

By way of continuity, for the last dozen years I have published a paper, The Howl, for residents of my small street and adjoining parts of our neighborhood. This publication I serve as copy boy, reporter, editor, deliverer, and general factotum.

Richard Griffin

Now that the players have long since washed the last traces of champagne out of their hair and the general hysteria has cooled, perhaps this veteran Red Sox rooter can share some reflections on our unaccustomed championship.

By contrast with the exultant rhapsodizings of many Boston sportswriters, allow me to indulge in some Scroogean thinking about the new status of our favorites. Being on top has its downside, I will argue, so if you are still swept away by the exploits of the Sox, you may wish to stop reading here.

My credentials for freelance musing about the Red Sox must be acknowledged as solid. Endowed with free passes from my newspaperman father, I first became accustomed to Fenway Park and the athletes who performed there in the middle 1930s. Often he would take me to Kenmore Square after my weekly piano lesson, holding out the sweetener of a game after I endured unwelcome instruction at the keyboard.

From the beginning, the Red Sox were my favorites, easily beating in my affections the other Boston team, the Bees. The Fenway sluggers−Jimmy Foxx, Joe Cronin, Bobby Doerr, and later, Ted Williams−used to keep me awed with their home runs, a factor that made me forgive the team’s inconstant pitching.  

My father, however, favored the Bees, a downtrodden team that showed no promise of finishing in the first division, much less first place. In 1940, under Casey Stengel as manager, the Boston Bees finished last with a record of 65 wins and 87 losses while drawing only 241,616 fans for the whole season.

Another credential as a fan comes from my having played baseball throughout my life. Even now I perform, often ingloriously, in a weekly game of softball, the ball being hard enough to come close to the real thing.

Only rarely do I actually attend a Red Sox game nowadays, however. It has been two years since I saw my last one in person. Among other things, the games last too long for my taste. In the World Series of 1918 when the Sox beat the Cubs, every game finished in under two hours; this fall, every one lasted at least an hour longer.

And why must patriotism require spectators to listen, every last of the seventh, to some pop star rendering God Bless America, and then wait until television airs its usual ads?

Late in the season, and certainly by the playoffs, the northern United States is too cold for baseball. I do not relish sitting immobile outside while freezing.

Also, the tickets are too expensive, many for seats that test your eyesight. Every game is a sellout, which means that you have precious little space to stretch. Where have the joys of rooting for a last-place team gone?

Now, by contrast with earlier days, hype plays a major role in every part of the game. The ball players exchange high fives (or head bumpings) for ground ball outs that may have advanced a runner one base. Similarly, they will congratulate a fellow player for hitting a routine fly ball that enables someone to move from second base to third, or for successfully executing a bunt. Such actions belong to an atmosphere of exaggeration that pervades the sport.

Despite its defenders, I still regard the American League’s designated hitter rule as spoiling the game. It enables athletes with only half of baseball’s basic skills to play, and bans from full participation in the contest pitchers who are exempted from doing what every other player must do.

Specialization does not please me either. Must we regard as a full participant a pitcher who appears only in the eighth inning of a game and then retires to the bench?

That so few players remain with one team throughout their career also disgruntles me. There is nothing quite like rooting for a Yaztremski or a Jim Rice for many seasons as you watch their athletic development on your own home ground.

Of course, I am aware of the faults of the past. The players of the 1930s when I first started following baseball were chattels of the owners. And the Red Sox refusal to begin hiring players of color until 1959 still stands as disgraceful.

My principal reason from feeling less than ecstatic about the sudden leap in Red Sox status, I fear, will deserve a special award for perversity. It is because I mourn the loss of the mystique that endeared the team to so many of us fans.

Now they have become winners like all the champions that ever were. Gone is that altogether special character that came with always managing to lose, even when ultimate victory was a single pitch or ground ball away.

Must I now transfer allegiance to the Chicago Cubs in order to reclaim that precious mystique that went with my team being ultimate losers?

Richard Griffin

“It’s very sad for the world; it’s very sad for humanity; it’s frightening.” So said my next door neighbor George, as we commiserated together the morning after the election. I consider this friend a sound judge of world events. He knows from personal experience what can happen to the people of the world when unwise leaders gain power.

Had John Kerry won the presidency, I would have been astonished but happy. The actual results appall me and plunge my spirits down to a new level of pessimism about our American future.

Once again, Lincoln (or whoever suggested the moral) needs to be amended: You can fool most of the people most of the time

For a challenger with serious weaknesses, Kerry did remarkably well. He had the disadvantage of having supported a misbegotten war, and then, to compound his error, he foolishly stated that he would have voted the same way all over again.

In response to inquiries from friends from other parts of the country, I always told them that I did not know anyone in Massachusetts who much liked Kerry. Though he revealed new facets of his personality during the long campaign, he remains a man who does not generate much warmth, certainly not to people in vast swathes of the country.

My pessimism about the future finds grounding in the record of George W. Bush’s last four years. His leadership, so widely admired in many parts of this country, strikes me as badly flawed and dependent on propaganda to look effective. His jettisoning a policy of deterrence and containment in favor of waging war against Iraq will surely rate always as a terrible blunder.

Never did I imagine that I would enter into old age with a federal government in Washington dominated by Republicans. The prospect of at least another four years with the current ideals of their party holding sway makes me dread the future, at least as it is determined by politics.

It seems like a return to the political condition of this country at my birth. In 1928, the GOP dominated American political life. Coolidge was president, followed by Herbert Hoover, chief executives who showed themselves incapable of anticipating or, in Hoover’s instance, dealing with the Depression that was to begin in 1929.

Of course, I am not such a zealot as to disapprove of Republicans per se. The tradition that we had earlier in Massachusetts history made me appreciate many who professed allegiance to the GOP. Such fine public servants as Leverett Saltonstall, Henry Cabot Lodge, and John Volpe served the commonwealth and the nation well and deserved the many votes received from Democrats.

But so-called liberal Republicans like these leaders have given way to narrow zealots like Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and now Tom DeLay whose agendas prefer political advantage over the common good. By contrast with the men cited above, the professed ideals of these men have been often been hypocritically contradicted by their actions.

Many of the elected leaders of the current Republican party bring values to American life that I cannot identify with. Centrally, their attitudes toward wealth and poverty especially alienate me, and we will now surely witness the phenomenon of an increasing gap between rich and poor.

Ironically, however, I do identify with many of the values that endear George W. Bush to so many Americans, especially those who vote in the Red States.

Religion stands out for me too as a precious part of my life. I believe in prayer and practice it regularly. My religious life oriented toward a parish church remains vital to me, as does my association with a community of faith. Though I consider the separation of church and state a principle vital to the nation, I welcome recognition of various religious traditions in American life.

I consider abortion an evil that the nation should try to discourage. To me, efforts to support women who choose to give birth rather than to abort are important. I also feel some wariness about stem cell research, partly because my ignorance of the subject is so far reaching.

Of course, there are many other values dear to many Americans of faith that I cannot approve. Much of the opposition to gay marriage, for instance, strikes me as coming from prejudice that seems unloving. Various forms of what is called patriotism stir in me feelings of alienation. What is done to the American flag, for instance, is not deserving of a constitutional amendment. And I consider campaigns against the teaching of evolution to be downright silly.

I also feel wary about the kind of religion followed by many of Bush’s most fervent supporters.

Religious enthusiasm has a long history of causing trouble to the body politic; piety, though it seems inoffensive, can actually prove destructive if not paired with wisdom.

Many world leaders felt wary of Bush being elected president. His militancy and American Firstism had alienated them and made them apprehensive about a newly empowered president who can now impose his policies with only ineffective opposition at home.

I feel concern about our environment at the hands of a man whose first allegiance seems to be economic advantage rather than care for our natural heritage. Similarly, precious little suggests that Bush will cut our dependence on foreign oil with its potential for further violence.

Chances for a radical revision of the Medicare prescription drug benefit now seem much diminished by the Republican dominance in both the White House and the Congress. Almost surely we elders will be treated to the spectacle of the medical and insurance.

Richard Griffin