Basil Chapman retired in 2002 from ACF Industries, a railroad car manufacturer in Huntington, West Virginia. Now only 60, he had worked for more than 38 years with the company. Most of that time, he was exposed to heavy fumes as he painted the cars inside and out.

Not surprisingly, Chapman eventually developed emphysema, a condition that forced him to retire early. In doing so, he did not worry about health care coverage since his union had a contract that provided ample lifetime benefits. In December of 2003, however, he discovered to his shock that the company was reneging on the agreement and forcing him to pay for some of his health insurance.

What made this change so shocking was that Chapman’s union had foregone higher wages in order to get wider coverage. The bargaining unit, chaired by him, had made it a point to get the agreement in writing so as to bind the company. Now ACF claimed to be free to override that contracted provision, which had assured retirees of ongoing health care.

My knowledge of Basil Chapman comes from a  Public Broadcasting System program called “The Broken Promise.” It belongs to the series entitled NOW and is hosted by David Brancaccio, who has succeeded Bill Moyers. This program will be shown on Boston’s Channel 2 on Friday, April 1, at 8 P.M.

“The Broken Promise” will be repeated on Sunday, April 3, at 11 AM on WGBH 44. If you are in the Comcast listening area, you will also find it broadcast on that same Sunday at 8 PM as part of WGBH World, Comcast 209.

As if Chapman’s loss of his promised health benefits were not sufficient grief, his company, almost incredibly, has sued him. In a ploy to put him and other retirees on the defensive, ACF has taken Chapman to court. The company has done so claiming that, by reason of the retirees planning to sue, there exists a controversy.

Wall Street Journal writer Ellen Schultz calls this move a “sort of preemptive strike” by which companies put their retired employees on the defensive. The corporations that do this go to circuit courts with a history of siding with employers on these issues.

Another person spotlighted in the program is Ken Bottolfs, formerly employed by General Tire (now known as Gencorp). When he first retired, the company was providing almost complete coverage for Ken and his wife. But in 2000, the company began charging them $180 each month. By now Ken is 83 years old and is paying a whopping $768 each month, an amount greater than his entire pension.

Like many other retired employees, Bottolfs is not without sympathy for the companies needing to face large and constant rises in health care costs. However, these costs average out to ten or twelve percent annually. By contrast, the cost to retirees for coverage has gone up as much as 500 percent.

The explanation for this stupendous discrepancy is that many companies now have set limits on the amount they will pay for each retiree. Gencorp, for example, has allocated $2700 per annum for each one, with the retired employee needing to pay the costs beyond the cap. For Ken Bottolfs, that meant paying almost $11,000 last year, an amount that will beggar him

As journalist Ellen Schultz has discovered, if retirees drop out of the employers’ health care coverage, then the companies actually make money doubly. That happens because not only can they stop paying for those former employees but also they can  remove the liabilities from their bottom line.

The two retirees featured in the program stand for many others in their own companies – – ACF and Gencorp – – and in many other companies as well. Many thousands have seen contractual promises broken by fiat. They are left with little or no recourse, since large corporations have the resources to beat them in court or to tie them up legally for years.

The two men who figure prominently in the program – – Basil Chapman and Ken Bottolfs – – are by no means fiery anti-company agitators. Rather, they seem sad and disillusioned that the companies to which they gave so much (even health in Basil’s case) have acted so callously toward them and their fellow retirees. For the sake of profits, the corporations do not scruple to wield cynical tactics against them.

To be sure, not every company weasels out of contracted commitments in this way. Those many that honor their pledges deserve to be applauded. One can only hope that the bad example of the two firms singled out here will not prove contagious. Americans who have labored long and faithfully to produce goods and services for the community have every right to be provided with health care and not be driven into penury in their later years.

Richard Griffin

“Congratulations! It is our pleasure to inform you that you have emerged as a Category “B” winner of the UK International Lotto. You are entitled to a prize sum of US $2,500,000.”

Lucky me! Imagine winning two and one-half million dollars without even entering a contest. All I had to do was open my email to find myself fabulously wealthy.

The only hitch I saw in the message was the following statement: “Due to the possibility of unscrupulous individuals filing a double claim, we suggest that you keep this award strictly confidential until your claim has been processed and notarized and your certificate of award obtained.”

In other words, don’t tell anyone about your good fortune; otherwise you will risk losing it.

Despite this caution, the notice entitled me to indulge in fantasies of being rich. I would now have enough money to travel everywhere in the world, first-class, without the annoyances faced by ordinary people. Daunting hotel rates would no longer pose a barrier to me, nor would eating in the most expensive restaurants.

More altruistically, I felt free to dream of sharing ample amounts of money with members of my extended family and with favorite friends. To relieve the poverty of other people, I could now establish a foundation that would furnish grants to those serving the poor.

Before doing so, however, it seemed prudent to check out what was known about my new benefactors. Could they possibly be on the level? If so, why were they singling me out to give me a bucketful of money when I had never contacted them?

After deciding to risk ruining my dream, I called the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office to investigate the legal standing of the lottery. There a polite and perceptive attorney asked me if I had entered the contest. When I answered no, he told me that the lottery was highly unlikely to be giving me anything.

The lawyer also referred me to a web site that provided information about the lottery. The main thing this source did was to label the lottery a scam. Not without a certain embarrassment, I realized how the tricksters at UK Lottery were out to fool me. Presumably, they hoped that money would flow, not from them to me, but in the opposite direction.

Fortunately, I always follow the rule of thumb never to reveal basic information about bank accounts and other data relating to my finances and those of my family. Even more resolutely, I would never send money to any organization unless I knew it to be trustworthy and doing something deserving of support.

One of the hazards of being an habitual computer user, and spending time online, is to receive hundreds of unsolicited and unwanted messages like the one cited above. Almost every day, I find in my email urgent letters from some alleged dignitary in Africa who asks me to help a person there to get out of a difficult financial bind.

The most recent message is from a retired colonel in Sierra Leone who offers me more than three million dollars to help him transfer money out of South Africa. Significantly, the officer wants me to keep the transaction confidential.

Do scamming scavengers prey on people like me because of my relatively advanced age? People in later life are often portrayed as ripe for the picking, so perhaps these electronic criminals cull us from the rest for an easy score.

Or they may simply play the numbers indiscriminately, sending out phony messages to thousands of people and relying on the law of averages to deliver some of us into their clutches.

Of course, you do not need to be a computer user to become victimized by a scammer. In 2000, the United States Senate’s Special Committee on Aging estimated that adult Americans, many of them in their later years, lose 40 billion dollars to telemarketing fraud alone.

The same committee put the number of phony telemarketing firms at ten percent of the 14,000 total. And they get away with their crimes: only an estimated one in 10,000 victims ever reports them to authorities.

If you are at all like me, you find it hard to believe that people act this way. I have enough respect for my fellow human beings that it’s difficult for me to believe that more than a few of them are out to get me.

Fortunately, however, my religious tradition has handed down to me a firm belief in original sin. That serves to offset easy optimism about human beings, myself included.

Strangers bearing gifts rarely act out of benevolence. More likely, they are out to get us. Experience suggests that they will succeed in this enterprise much more often than we like to think. For the most part, you and I are the only ones who can make them fail.

Richard Griffin

Teenagers, Generation X, Baby Boomers, Middle Age, Young Old, Old Old─some of these names for groups of people at various stages in life have become household words in America. They have come to seem natural and almost obvious categories for indicating the phases that everyone who lives long enough passes through.

And yet, most of these catch phrases were not known before the latter part of the twentieth century. They are inventions of modern society, concocted to describe the life course now extended further for so many people. But at least one writer regrets the effects of these terms: among other things, they have made us think of our lives as made up of pieces instead of being seamless webs.

Margaret Gullette, an independent scholar based in Newton, considers these age categories as arbitrary and artificial. They harden the stereotypes and make it look “as if age classes were utterly separate from one another and age were separable from any other identities.”

Worse still, she sees them as creations of political and economic forces that divide people, all the better to manipulate workers, to market products, and to make people know the limitations of their place in society.

In her most recent book, Aged By Culture, my friend Margaret argues, eloquently and often passionately, the case for rejecting this approach and forming differently focused kinds of age studies. She judges the current trend toward life segmentation as harmful to individuals and ultimately damaging to our society.

The author began her critical examination of age theory some two decades ago with a study of the middle years. By now, she has extended her analysis to include all the stages of life and she finds notable similarities in what is happening to each of them.

The fear of aging that runs rampant in the United States and the stereotypes foisted upon women and men of a certain age are social ills long recognized. What most people do not realize, however, is how these attitudes work their way down to groups of middle-aged and younger Americans.

Even children have been infected with negative views of growing older. Margaret Gullette begins her book with a critical look at the Boston Museum of Science exhibit about aging. Five years ago, this museum made it possible for children to enter a booth where they could see pictures of themselves as they would look at various ages. Predictably, some kids were revulsed at what they saw and came out disgusted and scared.

Critical of what capitalism does to groups of people, Margaret judges age groupings as an effective tool of social injustice. By isolating people in this way, dominant economic interests manipulate us and keep us docile. The way men and women in mid-life have been losing income over the past few decades and made fearful about losing their jobs is an obvious example.

People of every age, she says, need to band together and work for integration across the artificial barriers erected by monied interests. In my experience, the person who saw this mission most clearly and then rallied forces to support it was Maggie Kuhn.

I had the privilege of getting acquainted with this dynamic woman in her later years when I became associated with her organization, the Gray Panthers. Her distinctive vision was not of a group of old people who would advocate by themselves for their own interests. Rather, she envisioned a broad-based social movement made up of young and old. This movement would focus on social change to benefit people of every sort in this nation.

Unfortunately, this movement lost momentum with the physical decline and death of Maggie. But her vision deserves continued attention because it highlights the need for coalitions of older and younger in the cause of desperately needed change.

In her book Margaret Gullette endorses this approach, but her main emphasis falls on the need for scholars in the field of aging studies to examine critically how unrecognized biases in our culture distort our view of human growth and development. “We are aged more by culture than by chromosomes,” she writes. In her view, we are too easily taken in by the ideas foisted upon us by forces that are largely interested in making profits.

Her analysis is both radical and subtle. Most of us do not stop to examine the prevailing ideas by which we live. It does not occur to us that these concepts do not arise naturally but rather are imposed by mass media and other social forces. The commonly held view, for instance, that decline begins early in life and continues unabated till the end never receives the critical evaluation it needs.

Margaret, however, entitles another of her books “Declining to Decline” to indicate her response to this social stereotype. She feels committed to exposing the often subtle social manipulation worked upon Americans. For her, this analysis has become the main focus of a distinguished and productive scholarly career.

Richard Griffin

On my desk, as I write, lies an issue of Life magazine dated November 22, 1937. On page 30 it shows photos of a pundit, a secretary, and a newspaperman.

The pundit, Mark Sullivan, was reported to have “declared that it was the business not of the Government but of his secretary Miss Mabel Shea to provide for her old age.”

This remark prompted James L. Wright of the Buffalo Evening News to twit the President about Miss Shea.  Not one to hang back, “Mr. Roosevelt retorted that Mr. Sullivan apparently would give his secretary freedom to starve after 65.”

Miss Shea, for her part, spoke up boldly: “I think the Social Security system is a good thing. I am wholly a New Dealer.”

It must have taken some courage for the prim middle-aged woman shown sitting at her typewriter to speak out against her boss’s stated position. But, early on, she recognized the value of a federal program that had  begun just the year before.

Now, in the early years of the 21st century, America is being roiled by efforts to destroy the same program. The difference now is that Social Security has proven itself indispensable over the intervening 68 years.

In that time, it has protected older Americans and others against poverty, has reached out to the disabled and their families, and provided for widows and widowers. Contrary to assumptions of government programs being badly run, Social Security has operated with remarkable effectiveness and low-cost efficiency.

Yet, seeking political advantage, the current administration in Washington wants to revamp the program, depriving it of the features that make it work well. To my mind, the whole movement amounts to a scam.

The outlines of this strategy were spilled to the media by David Stockman in 1981. President Reagan’s budget director, Stockman revealed how that administration operated or, at least, wanted to operate. This approach came to be called “starving the beast.” They would increase military expenditures and cut taxes until drastic cuts became necessary in popular programs, especially human services.

A new version of this same strategy is apparently at work now. Take enough money from funds collected from payroll taxes and dedicated to Social Security, slash taxes for the rich, and soon you have a full-blown crisis that justifies drastic cutbacks in the programs that provide indispensable help to so many people.

Already, there is a crisis because of the Bush administration’s policies. The federal government is in deep debt, thanks in large part to tax cuts for the wealthy and war expenses. But that crisis cannot be laid at the door of Social Security.

This system is solvent now and will remain so for at least another long generation. It may possibly stay balanced for the foreseeable future, depending on a variety of factors such as the vigor of the economy and immigration rates.  

What I most object to in the “reform” proposals is that they shove a wedge between generations. To allay fears of those past middle age, the White House would exempt us from change in benefits.

But, seizing on the well-known skepticism of the younger generations about the future solvency of Social Security, they promise to privatize the system so that people now young can manage their own private accounts.

As if we all learned zip from the experience of the boom and bust in the 1990s, they propose letting people fend for themselves. And, as so often, they have come up with a propagandistic slogan, “The Ownership Society,’ intended to make the young believe that they no longer need to plan their future lives depending on government hand-outs.

As I never tire of repeating, we are all in this together. What lies at stake for some, lies at stake for all of us. We elders cannot allow ourselves to be bought off by promises that we will keep ours. “I’m all right, Jack” is not a suitable principle for a sound gerontology.

To its credit, AARP is standing up against the scam this time. After letting us down egregiously last year when it supported another political scam, the Medicare prescription drug legislation, the organization seems to be trying to make amends.

This change of heart must be having an impact. At least, the right-wing comic strip Mallard Fillmore, in a recent single panel, showed a child in bed screaming: “Mommy! There’s an AARP ad under my bed.” Another voice threatens: “Big bad Social Security reform is gonna eat you up!”

“Reform” of the sort proposed could eat everybody up, at least to the extent of shattering our community of interests and placing at unwise risk the financial security of future generations.

Mabel Shea got it right, back in 1937, when she rejected her boss’s opinion and forthrightly stated her own. And so did FDR. The Social Security system has proven, over and over, that it is indeed a good thing.

Richard Griffin

I feel sorry for Paul Shanley. This does not prevent me from feeling sorrow and deep outrage on behalf of his victims.

I also admire the courage of Shanley’s accuser whose testimony led to his tormentor’s conviction. He persevered on the stand despite the emotional turmoil he clearly had to endure. Tempted more than once to abandon his case, the unnamed firefighter managed to fight on.

Shanley has been sentenced to a prison term that will last at least until 2013. For him, this will make for an unhappy old age, to say the least. Not without reason, his victims feel this sentence altogether too lenient for what he did to them.

I first met Paul Shanley in 1962 at the parish in Stoneham where he was one of the priests on the ministerial staff. He impressed me, not only with his personal charm, but also with his dedication to ministry. There was nothing to show that, as was later alleged, he may have been already engaged in sexual abuse of young people.

In years following, I was a colleague of Paul Shanley in the campus ministry of the Archdiocese of Boston. He had a reputation for being creative, though unconventional in helping young people in trouble. Like many others of his peers, I uncritically welcomed his reaching out to street youth and did not ever imagine that he could be violating so flagrantly the trust we had in him.

What a human tragedy it is that the young priest who presumably entered the seminary with idealism and dedication is entering upon the last phase of his life in such disgrace before the world! That his life trajectory should have taken this course strikes me as an almost unimaginable tragedy.

Surely his family and friends must have felt pride on the day of his ordination, happy that Paul was setting out on a career full of promise and idealism. The contrast between the handsome smiling young man then, and the stoic 74-year-old figure who stood with head bowed listening impassively to his condemnation last week, is in itself painful. His addiction to abusive behavior strongly suggests that he should never have entered a seminary in the first place.

That he leaves behind him such a trail of havoc, having done much to ruin the lives of his victims, rates as horrible. It is hard to imagine how he can go on living with that weight of shame. And, given the scandalous fate of John Geoghan, Shanley must fear what can happen to him in a prison run by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

He must also live with relentless fury from his accusers. One of them says he wants Shanley to die in prison but “however he dies, I hope it’s slow and painful.” That same man spoke of going to bed the night of the guilty verdict “with a smile from ear to ear.”

I cannot share these sentiments about another human being, however heinous his crimes. My faith is in a God who never gives up on us, no matter how mired in sin we are. Granted, I have not been myself abused and cannot speak with the voice of those who have, but still it seems to me wrong to wish evil for another.

Just as I hope those abused will find healing, so my hope is for Paul Shanley to discover, if he has not already, God’s forgiveness and the healing of his own soul. It is clear that he will suffer grievously in prison, and he undoubtedly fears reprisals such as John Geoghan suffered. And he will almost surely be tempted to despair.

This is no idyllic way to spend old age, to be sure. Especially when you have brought the punishment upon yourself, it must be terribly bitter.

Anyone who takes his cue from Jesus, however, cannot give up on himself. The inmost soul of a human being, unknown by others, is never beyond the reach of God’s knowledge and love.

For a spiritual perspective on Paul Shanley’s situation, I consulted a man deeply versed in the Christian tradition. His first response was one that seems to me sound and worth keeping in mind. “Civil conviction has nothing to say about sin, grace, and forgiveness,” he told me.

“There is a higher order,” he continued, “and the actions of government do not necessarily reflect how God looks at it.” Churches and other religious institutions have chaplains in prisons so as to hold out the offer of divine forgiveness even for the worst kind of sins.  

The moral situation of those abused and that of Shanley are surely far different. However, they have in common the need for spiritual help that goes beyond what human beings can provide. I hope for all of them that they will experience the healing power of divine and human love.

Richard Griffin

Given the choice, would you rather eat dinner at a restaurant or in your own home? The data on American eating habits suggest that you are likely to opt for the restaurant.

Almost half of us adults eat out at least once a day, 44 percent as the National Restaurant Association measures it. Reportedly, we spend close to 50 percent of our food money on away-from-home eating.

As a rule, I much prefer to eat at home. But when did anyone ever accuse me of being normal?

My main gripe with restaurants in general is that they serve too much food. To my taste, it’s downright unappetizing to confront plates loaded with whatever.

Almost always, I would prefer half as much food for half─or even three-quarters─as much money. And yet, only one restaurant known to me features a menu giving a choice of larger or smaller portions.

Also, eating out is often an activity hazardous to our health. As the AARP Public Policy Institute warns, good nutrition becomes much more difficult when we buy meals or snacks outside.

And the same source urges us to avoid eating places that entice customers with rich dessert carts and all-you-can-eat specials. Preferring restaurants that offer fruit, salads, and other healthy foods, instead of opting for the nearest pizza or burger joint is better for us.

These initial thoughts may tempt you to indict me for nutritional perfectionism. Not guilty. I do stand for healthy eating habits, but pleasure in eating remains important to me.

Over-analyzing food robs diners of enjoyment. Focusing mainly on the nutritional effect of meals is a surefire way of depriving us of pleasure. This attitude can drive us into judging that whenever food tastes good it must be bad for us and vice versa.

Such a negative approach to eating can make us wish for the innocent days of our youth when we ate Spam or Franco-American spaghetti without giving a thought to their nutritional impact. Canned hash, slices of bread topped with butter and sugar, and thick frappes were other features in my young eating life.

But that was long before Americans worried about such things as fat.

Risking cultural elitism, let me cite as good eaters our old allies, the French. The recently published book “French Women Don’t Get Fat,” shares some reasons why one does not often see overweight women (and men) on the streets of Paris.

What makes the difference? “French women take pleasure in staying thin,” says the author Mireille Guiliano, “while American women see it as a conflict and obsess over it.” Both women and men in the United States have become obsessed with weight, much to the detriment of our enjoying food.

Weight will remain an important issue in the United States, however, as long as so many of us continue to eat large helpings of stuff that poses a threat to our health. For the senior generations among us, the stakes are higher: good eating habits can more easily make the difference between our physical/mental flourishing and eating-induced illness.

To help with eating well, in this time of nutritional high-mindedness, a few rules-of-thumb can help. To me, the single most important rule is not to eat too much of any one offering. This approach goes far to help us eat healthily and, I am persuaded, enjoyably.

At the risk of seeming merely precious, let me also propose the ideal of each major meal being an event. Like all ideals, it cannot always be achieved but it’s still worth aiming at.

One factor that makes it an event is not the food itself, but its presentation. The difference between serving dinner out of Styrofoam packages and dishing it out from china bowls may seem trivial, but it actually counts for a lot. People who appreciate food care about how it looks.

In the course of my work with elders, I remember meeting a retired single woman who lived alone: each evening she would lay out the tablecloth, light the candles, put on sweet music, and serve herself a well-cooked dinner. Her income was modest but she knew how to live.

If we have the luck to eat without feeling rushed, that too makes meals  incomparably better experiences. Gulping food down in a hurry makes for neither good digestion nor feelings of contentment.

Meals that bring old and young together also strike me as highly desirable: the contemporary decline of family meals surely serves to impoverish the lives of Americans young and old.

Compressing morbidity, the phrase that the medical pros use to talk about reducing the time when we are sick at the end of our lives, can in large part result from smart eating.  

A robust appetite for good food counts as one of life’s greatest gifts. If only we could eat more of what is good for us and do so in amounts suited to our best interests!

Richard Griffin