One Characterization of the Coming Decade

Re: Bob Greene’s column of Nov. 25, “A Good Name for the ‘90s?” How about Decade of Decadence? I am assuming that the gap between rich and poor, the have-nots and the haves, will keep broadening as witness two contrasting headlines in that day’s Times--”Schoolchildren’s Obsession with Expensive Brand-Name Clothes” and “Needy May Get Up to 16% Less From Food Banks.”

Which made me recall what a spokesman of the dispossessed and disadvantaged, the English poet Oliver Goldsmith, wrote more than a hundred years ago: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates and men decay.”

GLADY FOREMAN

Los Angeles