Heroic public servants have made great sacrifices for the nation

MOST of us, I think, still have difficulty coming to terms with what happened to our economy in the crash.

In years to come, historians and analysts will publish thousands of words trying to pinpoint the causes. And maybe, when the history is written, the real villains will be identified (I’ll come back to the subject of villains in a minute).

But I wonder will anyone seek out the heroes? If we do succeed in rebuilding our economy, it will only be because so many people have made sacrifices along the way. Not all of those sacrifices have been made willingly, of course. Nobody volunteered to lose their jobs. Not too many of us have enthusiastically embraced concepts like negative equity. We haven’t cheered for property taxes.