Around the middle of this month, the United States government will make a notable announcement: it will declare this nation to have 300 million residents. The Census Bureau will officially certify the number, making our country only the third in the world, after China and India, to have at least this many people.

We have come a long way in a short time. On the day of my birth in 1928 we had only 120 million. By 1968 that number had jumped to 200 million, and now, fewer than four decades later, we have reached 300.

More striking than the number of people is our diversity. In my memory, nearly everyone used to look like me, white and fair-skinned. Now, in many parts of our country, you see people of many different looks.

We expect to find congested variety on New York City subway cars, but you can find some of the same diversity in Des Moines. On my visits there, I have been pleasantly surprised to find a more than a few people from African countries as fellow worshipers at the cathedral.

These neighbors have brought new variety into our lives. Routinely, we eat sushi, tortillas, and pad thai. Our sports stadiums feature newly popular games, and they resound with new languages as do our churches. New communities of faith have sprung up, and we have friends and colleagues who worship in the Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim tradition.

How should one feel about these demographic changes that have so transformed the US of A? For me, it’s largely matter for celebration. Our size and our diversity are precious resources. Our new populations grace us with new opportunities. The astounding variety within our 50 states can benefit us all.

However, our national arrival at 300 million also provokes questions. Why, for example, in such a large and mixed nation, is our national leadership so poor? Cannot we find men and women better equipped to guide us toward fulfillment of our potential?

Our current leadership, president and Congress alike, have led us into war on which this nation spends some six billion dollars a month. Our nation has immense resources, and immense needs as well; why are we mortgaging the future in the interest of dubious short-term goals?

To cite one example: when we can boast of so many inventive citizens, why does this country persist in its reliance on huge imports of oil? Surely we have enough people skilled in science and technology to discover alternative fuels and put them to use.

And why are so many of our fellow Americans, over two million of them, confined to prison? There must be creative ways of transforming this unfortunate situation, unique in the world.

That more than 40 million of our 300 million people live without the security of health insurance is a scandal that cries out for remedy. Such deprivation should not be tolerated in a nation so rich and so creative.

An aspect of the new American diversity for which I have special feeling is the aging of the population. With the eye of a gerontologist himself growing into late life, I observe how many of my fellow citizens have reached my advanced years or even further. You don’t have to visit Florida to notice it either: walk down any city sidewalk and you will be impressed by how many people outrank you in age.

This demographic evolution is often presented as an intractable problem. However, the graying of America better deserves to be seen as an opportunity. By reason of more advanced schooling and improved health, many Americans middle-aged and older are equipped to work for the good of the community. That vision is what drives Civic Ventures, a national movement that highlights the potential of elders for pitching in.     

Immigration, which is part of the collective memory of most American families, continues to enrich this nation. Many of the workers we meet in restaurants, health clinics, taxi cabs, and stores have clearly arrived from another part of the world.

When I ask where they come from, they tell me Brazil, Sudan, Vietnam or other far-away places. Some have escaped from murderous conditions in their native country; nearly all have found a better economic situation for themselves and their families.

It is impossible not to be moved by their stories. I feel pleasure at their good fortune and a new awareness of the privileges that I enjoy as a U.S. citizen.         

Demographers expect this nation’s population to level off at about 400 million a few decades from now. Given our immigration and birth rates, they project that the United States will retain its ranking as third largest nation after China and India. This figure should assure the US of continued great human resources.

If only we can learn to deploy them better!

Richard Griffin

One farmer, Arnaldus Palaganus, has suffered the theft of his two oxen and appeals to the king’s agent for justice. Another, Ysardus Gaufredi, has had his grain stolen by the local bailiff in whose tower it was kept for safekeeping. He, too, has a grievance that he hopes will be set right.

These events took place some 800 years ago in Languedoc, a region in the south of France. Thanks to documents written on paper or parchment, historians know about them in detail. Scholars can study these stories, among other reasons, to understand better what life was like in those medieval times.

That is the driving force behind the research of Anne Porter, a graduate student of my acquaintance. Anne spent several weeks this summer at work in libraries located in Paris, Nîmes, and Montpellier, reading 13th-century documents in preparation for writing a thesis.

What draws me to this student’s research is my fascination with the way people lived long before the modern era. The discovery of attitudes and habits of mind stirs in me continued interest. Not situated or equipped to do such research myself, I take pleasure in the work of scholars who devote their lives to such an enterprise.

It’s hard work, reading the documents. The paper on which they are written is fragile. And this young woman is confronted with language long fallen into disuse. “Getting used to medieval Latin was hard at first─a lot of different vocabulary for one thing─but after you’ve worked with a lot of medieval docs, it just becomes second nature,” she tells me by email.

Anne finds the main documents, called “the complaints,” in Paris but she also travels to the two southern cities where she looks for deeds, wills, acts of homage, and other material to provide more detail. In particular, she hopes to find “traces of people who appear in the complaints.”

The complaints were addressed to the agents sent out by Louis IX, King of France in the first half of the 13th century. These royal agents were empowered to arbitrate grievances made against local officials. In about two thirds of the cases the King’s men reversed such decisions and redressed grievances.

Louis IX had the reputation of being an unusually good man. In fact, this view of him was so widespread that he was later declared a saint, one still honored as such by the Catholic Church.

Asked about this king’s reputation for sanctity, Anne Porter hedges. As the documents witness, he clearly treated the people of Languedoc well, but this young scholar tends to think he had a double motive.

Their area had been incorporated into the kingdom of France shortly before, and Louis was anxious to please the people of this southern region so as to secure its place in his realm. However, the documents suggest that he also cared about them and their concerns.

While perhaps admiring him for some of his personal traits, we citizens of the 21st century would be likely to give Louis bad marks for some of his military actions. Having been so gung-ho about the Crusades, for example.

But, as a person of the pre-modern age, he clearly brought a different standard for judgment to what now appear as shameful military excursions differently: he and those around him considered the Crusades a service offered to God.

Incidentally, centuries later, when one of his successors, Louis XVI, was about to be guillotined during the French Revolution, the attending chaplain reportedly said to him: “Fils de Saint Louis, montez au ciel” (Son of St. Louis, go up to heaven.) So, whatever doubts remain about his moral stature, the memory of the 13th century king had resonance long after his own era.

And what of his subjects who lodged complaints? Were they citizens in the modern sense? Not quite, answers my researcher friend. “Being a civis (Latin for citizen) carried very specific legal rights─rights of transit, different taxes, etc.─but had less to do with political participation.”

As to civil rights, they would not have used the words to indicate something that belongs to each person. “Things were wrong because they were contrary to law or custom, not because they violated someone’s rights,” my friend responds.

Anne Porter is engaged in a fascinating enterprise, but she experiences the ups and downs typical of graduate students doing research. When her progress is evident, she feels great. But when the inevitable doubts about the value of her work set in, the project can seem to her “pointless and misguided.”

Even in these moments, however, she remembers one insight: “I think fundamental self-doubt may be in integral part of dissertation writing.”

I admire her and other students confronted with the challenges of research and writing. They strike me as engaged in work that has importance for the community. Not all research, of course, has this kind of value but the effort to discover more about how our predecessors lived and thought deserves appreciation and moral support.

Richard Griffin

“A lot of them don’t want to pitch any more, a lot of them don’t wanna pitch beyond the sixth inning.”  This is Joe Morgan’s response to my thesis about changes in the way major-league baseball is played these days.

I had suggested that batters today don’t just want to get hits; they want to wear down the pitcher. They use new tactics to accomplish this: the intentional foul ball and, when possible, not swinging at pitches. These have become offensive weapons designed to force the starting pitcher to exceed his pitch count and to exit by the fifth inning, if not sooner.

When, on August 18th, the Red Sox and the Yankees played the longest nine-inning game ever, guess how many foul balls there were. An astounding 93!  Yankee batters like Derek Jeter and Bobby Abreu make a specialty of this, but other hitters, Yankees and the Red Sox, have adopted the practice.

Only in certain tense situations, however, do foul balls provide much excitement. Usually, they are time-consuming interruptions in the action. Foul balls are not the only factor, of course, in lengthening games. But they play a significant role in the additional hour that games now last, by contrast with games in 1940.

The Joe Morgan mentioned above (not to be confused with the Hall of Famer and broadcaster of the same name) became the manager of the Red Sox during the 1985 season and presided over the “Morgan miracle” when the team won 12 straight games.

“You know why they wear them out?” Morgan asks. “Because the pitchers don’t throw strikes.” And that, according to this old pro, has happened because of expansion. But, he adds, “thank God for all the Latin players.”

For Morgan, the best baseball ever played was in the pre-expansion era, when Jackie Robinson, followed by an influx of great black and Latino players, took the game to new heights. He says that current major leaguers are bigger and stronger, but lack staying power.

Now 75, this Walpole native shared his views with me before the 2006 Oldtime Baseball Game, an event promoted by Boston Herald sportswriter Steve Buckley and staged in Cambridge to benefit children with cerebral palsy or cystic fibrosis.

An older veteran, Johnny Pesky appeared in his Red Sox uniform, seeming remarkably trim and fit at age 86. To me, in bodily shape he looks little different from when I first saw him play in 1942. His only obvious defect is that he does not agree with my thesis about the most recent changes in the game.

 “You’re wrong,” he says about my views “They try to hit every ball out of the ball park.”

Another veteran, Lenny Merullo, will be 90 next May. Dressed in a Chicago Cubs uniform, he, like Pesky, is physically and mentally vibrant. A native of the Orient Heights section of East Boston, he broke in with the Cubs in 1941 and played his whole career with that team.

A slick fielding shortstop, Merullo made himself indispensable, even though he was never a strong hitter. He boasts of holding the major league record for making the most errors in the same inning: four.

“We never heard of the term ‘pitch count’ in my day,” says this big leaguer. “Pitchers used to pace themselves so they could go nine innings – they don’t do that now.” But he, too, refuses to buy my explanation.

Fortunately for me, the three former major leaguers─Morgan, Pesky, and Merullo─were not the only baseball authorities present that evening. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin was also at the field to throw out the first ball. She threw it with authority, like someone who has had a long familiarity with the game.

In complimenting her on this pitch, I told her that I would have fouled it off. By contrast with the three former players, Goodwin tended to agree with my thesis. As an old-time Brooklyn Dodger addict, she remembers the game as being very different and pitchers often going the nine inning route.

That the games at Ebbets Field were so much shorter than games today points to changes in their very structure, I claim, an explanation for which Goodwin shows sympathy.

As I see it, some forms of specialization have changed the structure of major league baseball, and not for the better. In particular, dividing pitchers into starters, middle relievers, closers, has broken the continuity of the game.

Bringing in someone to pitch to only one batter, quite often a lefty to face a left-handed hitter, does not add much to the game except time. The intentional foul ball and the needless accumulation of pitches contribute to this new tedium.

I’m glad to have a major league historian in sympathy with me. Granted, she and I never played ball in the big time. Why can’t those ancients who did─Morgan, Pesky, and Merullo─see it my way?                                                          

Richard Griffin

At a party marking the festive occasion, a friend of the bride passed around a yellowed clipping from a Boston newspaper published in the summer of 1956. It showed my brother John and his new wife Mary Rose as a fresh-faced just-married couple in their middle 20s.

Now, by contrast, they show the facial lines of their mid 70s, signs of lives vigorously and generously lived. Other photos from the intervening years display the two at various stages of development─early adulthood, middle years, and now early old age.

Such graphic portrayals of aging never fail to transfix my attention. They always set me to reflect on human change with its combination of surprise and slow but relentless advance. Can those smooth young faces belong to the same human beings as those now displayed with their wisened (if not wizened) countenances of today?

The party, held under a large tent in the Cape Cod town where they have lived since 1960 (?), was an affirmation of family bonds. The seven adult children of Mary Rose and John were all present and in festive mood as they orchestrated their parents’ 50th wedding anniversary celebration and their father’s 75th birthday.

In the climax of this party ritual, each of the sons and daughters came forth in turn to regale us all with anecdotes about their parents, stories that were culled from the children’s growing-up years. Chosen for their humorous qualities, these tales evoked sometimes boisterous laughter from honorands and guests alike.

One of the boys recalled, for instance, discovering that the new babysitters were nudists. A daughter remembered that, like many children, she was sent to bed early when her parents entertained adult friends. This little girl had discovered a floorboard that was loose, allowing her to eavesdrop on the conversation in the living room below.

Such anecdotes, not always startling in themselves, take their value from the ties of a strong family. That is what emerged most vividly from the occasion: the love and respect of former children, now adults, for their parents.

And this was clearly what John and Mary Rose most valued in the celebration. They felt themselves appreciated not merely for all that they had done for their children but for who they themselves are recognized to be.

Seeing three generations of extended family members together in one place renewed my respect for the strength in family ties. I was impressed once again by how the younger members of our extended family value their relationships with aunts and uncles, cousins and in-laws, and even the friends of their relatives.

Clearly, they have learned from growing up in this family atmosphere how much it counts to have a family. My daughter Emily does not need to be taught what inner and outer security she derives from being bound to relatives who care about her. Nor do the grandchildren of my brother John and sister-in-law Mary Rose require instruction about what it means to be related.

The photos I took on this occasion witness to the joy felt by virtually everyone at being together in celebration of two principal members of the extended family. It wasn’t just the lobster and the clam chowder, along with wine and other drinks, that put us in festive mood. We felt high because of the human achievement of creating and fostering rich family relationships.

Both Mary Rose and John are subject to some of the physical disabilities of later life. But, like so many others among their age peers, they live vibrantly in what is mistakenly called retirement.

They spend much of their time kin-keeping, serving as active resources for family members. Generously, they give help and other assistance to those within the extended family and elsewhere to those who can benefit from them.

As the oldest member of my parental family, I now feel myself to be leading the way into old age. Whether my three brothers and two sisters look to me for any kind of guidance on this sometimes perilous journey I do not know. But I take it as a privilege to have received the gift of longevity and intend to use it for others, when appropriate.

I count it as a special blessing to be on good terms with all the members of my extended family. With every one of them I can talk and exchange views. But, as the decibel level when we get together attests, we do not agree on everything. Even on politics and religion, we have been known to argue.

The gathering for John and Mary Rose’s fiftieth highlights both their love and the love that abounds among those related to them. Without sentimentalizing human weaknesses, I will continue to celebrate the ties that bind us together in a family. Only two of our family members can as yet observe the 50th anniversary of marriage, but we are united in praising it as an ideal.

Richard Griffin

Of the more than 1,300 people who died because of Hurricane Katrina, more than 70 percent were over age 60.

The elderly population of the New Orleans area was hardly overwhelming: perhaps 15 percent. But they made up almost three-fourths of those who died.

How can people still claim that the era of ageism ─ discrimination against the elderly ─ has passed. These stark facts should have scandalized public officials and the general public more than ever before.

With the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina upon us this week, we can seize the opportunity to reflect on these deaths. Moreover, we can ask what is being done to protect us against other disasters taking a similarly large toll of older people.

I will not soon forget the photo of sick old people, mostly women, lying on flimsy stretchers, with their legs exposed, aside or on the baggage area conveyer belts as they awaited evacuation from the New Orleans airport. And accounts of the drowning of 34 residents of St. Rita’s Nursing Home will continue to haunt many of us who read about it.

A recent issue of Public Policy & Aging Report focuses on disasters, both natural and man-made, and their impact upon the older members of the population. Several knowledgeable contributors claim that the nation is still badly prepared to safeguard elder citizens when such events strike again.

Veteran readers of these columns may recall two previous ones that I wrote about catastrophes that victimized many elders. The first was the heat wave in Chicago that claimed the lives of more than 700 older residents in July of 1995. An excellent book by Eric Klinenberg of New York University analyzed the reasons for that disaster.  

The second took place in Paris when an astonishing ten thousand people, most of them elders, were estimated to have died during a heat wave that engulfed that city in August 2003. Though Paris experienced very hot weather this summer, officials seem to have learned in the interim how to take better care of their oldest citizens.

Despite the lessons learned from these human and natural disasters, they have sparked too little planning and research on the subject. “Older adults represent a blindspot in disaster planning and research,” according to Johns Hopkins professor Thomas Glass.

“In times of disaster,” Glass says, “older adults, many of whom may be functioning well in their communities, are challenged beyond their reserves.” He regrets that “little attention has been paid to the question of how best to plan for and respond to the needs of older persons in a disaster.”

Hence the continuing debacle for elders in New Orleans.

Even now, a year later, “very few recovery initiatives have specifically addressed the needs of older adults,” reports Jennifer Campbell, director of the Hurricane Fund for the Elderly. In fact, she says, older people without money and family have been explicitly told not to return to New Orleans.

Another academic, Share DeCroix Bane, emphasizes the mental health needs of elders who have been displaced. She feels concern about both “the initial chaos of the disaster and the ongoing stress of the aftermath.”

For those fortunate enough to have survived, stress about the loss of their homes and neighborhoods must be a continuing problem. In fact, more than 1,300 elders in Louisiana who used to live in the community now reside in nursing homes. For them, normal living in their later years has been shut off, even as a possibility.

A journalistic colleague, Paul Kleyman, recalls covering the story of the 1989 Loma Prieto earthquake in the San Francisco area. He tells of rescue workers trying to contact many elders cut off from food, potable water, medication and other forms of help. “Without a map of where to find vulnerable people, he remembers, “rescuers had to go door-to-door, sometimes not finding elders or people with disabilities for several days.”

Kleyman also reminds fellow journalists that “most disaster rescue and recovery plans hardly─if at all─mention older people.”

I see the failure of governmental and other agencies to include elder citizens in disaster planning as a failure of imagination. Like many other adults, most planners cannot see themselves ever being in the same situation as their seniors.

Instead, if they think of them at all, these professionals implicitly consider people much older than themselves as a race apart. Their consciousness does not envision older people as their future selves. This inability serves as a solid mental block that prevents them from working out what a civilized society must do for its senior citizens.

But many of my age peers could do more to cultivate people of all ages in the communities where we live. We especially need to make friends with our juniors who will remember us in our times of need. This reaching out I do not consider selfish because those younger people who do help us will benefit also.

Being compassionate brings its own rewards.

Richard Griffin

In March of 1784 Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to a close friend in which he described what it was like for him to be 78 years old.

“I still exist,” he told Mrs. Mary Hewson, “and still enjoy some pleasure in that existence, though now in my seventy-ninth year. Yet I feel the infirmities of age come on so fast, and the building to need so many repairs, that in a little time the owner will find it cheaper to pull it down and build a new one.”

In an era when medicine was still primitive, you have to wonder what “repairs” might have entailed. In any event, Franklin would go on to live another six years, so the building would hold out for a considerable time against the deterioration that had begun to set in.

As a person who has just entered into his 79th year, I can identify with this extraordinarily creative man of the 18th century by acknowledging some of the infirmities of which he took note. Like him, I also find pleasure in living, though I would put this fact more strongly than he did. His word “some” suggests that he felt a strong admixture of distress.

This great Bostonian-turned-Philadelphian, by contrast with me, had exceeded the average life expectancy for people of his day by a wide margin. In 18th century America, I would guess that men lived not much beyond age 40 on average, though such a statistic would be skewed by a great many deaths in infancy and childhood.

By contrast, I have moved past the current average life expectancy of 75 or so for men. To catch up with women I will have to reach 80.

The longevity that we have come to expect in the 21st century ranks as one of the great achievements of modern times. Thanks to public health measures and to improvements in medicine, we look upon advanced years as something normal rather than exceptional.

True, the longevity of present-day Americans is often presented as a problem rather than a triumph. We read gloomy forecasts of insuperable economic and social crises that will be caused by the aging of the population. But the extension of human life, no matter what problems it brings, deserves to be seen as one of the major breakthroughs in history.

Still, all this does not make age 78 sound sexy. This number 78 lacks charisma, cachet, or any kind of mystique. It’s an awfully flat numeral that serves merely as a way-station on the road to the 80s.

To look back, 75 has a lot more punch to it, as does the staccato 77 with its echo of numbers once regarded as sacred. And the 80 or 85 that I hope are lying ahead can be relied upon to stir enthusiasm. But no one gets excited about 78.

Yet, every birthday comes as a gift, and I cherish each one. I identify with the dictum of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who said, “Just to live is a blessing.” It surprises me to have lived this long, to have survived so many threats to continued life.

Despite its bland numerical character, I have special reason for welcoming 78. This birthday comes after a winter of unexpected physical affliction that sometimes made me wonder in what state my body would be on this date. Fortunately, though that body bears the scars of surgery, it functions remarkably well.

I often think about those who did not make it this far. It sobers me to think of the close friends and family members who did not reach 78.

On this birthday, I mourn the loss of some who were close to me. The two Bobs who were my friends for six decades, and dear extended-family members Joanne and Gregory: how can it be that they are gone while I am still here?

My relish for life must also be modified by the terrors of the world in which we live. Of course, all of my age peers survived the unprecedented horrors of the 20th century, with its mass murders and other insults to human dignity. Still, this new century has already proved productive of new levels of fear and human suffering.

The state of advanced adulthood, I find, bears a close resemblance to the other stages of life. It has its satisfactions and its burdens. The main difference, I discover, is a change in the balance physical burdens and satisfactions. On the present scale, ailments have become weightier.

The other factor, of course, is one’s vision of the end. It seems much closer than it used to. I do not expect to rival the world’s record holder for longevity, the French lady who lived to 122. But, as they lengthen, I do hope to continue feeling grateful for the days of my life.

Richard Griffin

George Washington, in retirement at Mount Vernon, subscribed to ten of them. One of his biographers, Joseph Ellis, shares this fact as an indication of how important newspapers were to the first president.

Several generations later, Abraham Lincoln was an avid reader of newspapers. Like other public figures of the time, he would seize on these publications for reports of what was going on both locally and in the country at large.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, in her recent historical masterpiece Team of Rivals, underscores the importance of newspapers to Lincoln and his fellow citizens.

As the son of a life-long journalist, I became addicted at an early age to reading newspapers, a habit that has lasted to the present. In particular, I recall reading with fascination each day the paper for which my father worked, the Boston Post, with its accounts of the great events of my young life. In particular, my teenage years were filled with vivid accounts of the fighting in both the European and the Pacific theaters of World War II.

Occasionally during these years, my father gave me tours through the Post, where in his office I met his fellow journalists and, down below, was awed by the giant presses spewing forth the day’s papers.

When in college, I served one summer as a copy boy at the Boston Globe, then a sleepy publication housed on Washington Street’s Newspaper Row. There I saw for myself up close the workings of a large newsgathering organization with all of its traditions and its technology.

Of course, I was on a low rung of the journalistic ladder. Mostly I picked up copy from the editors’ desk, folded it, and stuffed it into a metal tube, and then sent it on its pneumatic way to the composing room.

In those days when big cities typically had half a dozen major papers, I could not have imagined the shrinking that has reduced them to only one or two in most cities across America.

My attachment to newspapers, however, is not merely sentimental. Instead, I regard them as essential to society and its needs.

In my later years, I feel less troubled by the decline of many big-city newspapers than by the habits of many non-newspaper reading Americans, especially the young. Of course, I am aware of many who read news online, but often this material is far less informative, reliable, and incisive than newspapers.

Even students at intellectually demanding colleges and universities are often not well informed about their own country and the wider world. I meet some who have no clear information about matters of great domestic and international import. This condition may, I fear, become habitual, lasting well beyond their student days.

This bothers me because of my conviction that the well-being of our national community depends to a large extent upon citizens being aware of the actions taken by various levels of government in our name. Unless we take steps to keep informed, we can easily be manipulated and our real interests ignored.

Last spring, John S. Carroll, formerly editor of the Los Angeles Times, gave a talk reprinted under the title “What Will Become of Newspapers?” Speaking to fellow editors from across the country, Carroll asked a series of questions about the current  journalistic situation and prospects for the future.

One of the questions he posed was: “If newspapers disappear, should the public care?”  By pointing to the central function of newspapers his answer goes to the heart of the matter: “This is our role: Newspapers dig up the news. Others repackage it.”

As Carroll observes, search engines on the web have no staffs of reporters; neither do blogs. He estimates that 80 percent of America’s news “originates in newspapers.”

In keeping us informed, newspapers continue to be essential. Even when television, the Internet, and other media provide information, they commonly fail to present enough background to give us the knowledge we need.

Newspapers, at their best, also offer reasoned analysis of events that we ought to know something about. Issues on the national and international level ─illegal immigration, the minimum wage, fundamental changes in Social Security, the wars in Iraq and the Middle East, allowing India technical assistance for nuclear weaponry─demand reliable information and evaluation.

On the state and local level, we citizens need to know about many other issues─ public transportation and the condition of our public school systems, to mention only two. To me, community newspapers like this one serve an indispensable purpose. We need to know and, so far as possible, to understand what is going on.

Carroll urges his editor colleagues to take action: “It is important for us to explain to the public why journalism─real journalism practiced in good faith─is absolutely essential to a self-governing nation.” Sharing this belief, I continue to hope for more people to gain this insight.

Richard Griffin