My dad worked his whole career for Ma Bell. AKA blue collar union job that mostly doesn't exist any more. When he was young (late 50s), the old-timers told him stories about the depression.

What Ma Bell did, during the depression, was cut everyone's hours equally, and they didn't lay off anyone. The phone guys knew they had the loyalty of each other, their union, and their company, and they all survived. No one starved. They got down to where they worked 10 hours a week or less, but no one starved. In the 50s, they reminisced about how those were the best years--they had all the time in the world to camp, to fish, to work on their houses with scrounged materials, to play with their kids.

It's another relic that will unfortunately never come again, that concept of loyalty to and loyalty from a company. I've been laid off, I've been left behind when my friends got the axe. All of it sucks. I'd like to hear about just one company that weathers this economic storm by keeping their workers instead of dumping them like rotten fish.

For the love of god, people! (Pardon, it's just a figure of speech). We as a nation once went through a Great Depression. Those of us who were born within 20 years of it got an earful for our entire upbringing, but in the case of my parents they were both poor before Black Thursday (and the following Black Monday and Tuesday) ever happened,so they lost nothing because "When you got nothin' you got nothin' to lose."

Andrew Leonard has been careful to speculate clearly -- that is to let us know he is speculating, sounding a timely word of warning, and not, repeat not shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. He points out many serious problems with which we have lived for the past quarter century and which, if allowed to go on indefinitely, could trigger a depression; maybe not a Great one, but while we have endured any number of recessions since World War II, we've also gone through boom times and not all of them were attributable to Reaganomics and sheer, naked greed, which is what seems to drive the engine right now.

Panic is not only unbecoming of Americans (and the Great Depression is as close as we can come to the Battle of Britain, so we need to get over ourselves),it also is absolutely useless as a strategy. The prior letter writers here have all helped illustrate exactly why there is an "Invisible Hand" which rocks our economic cradle: the life of a high-financier is one based on hunches and emotion, not much different than claiming poker as a career skill. Of course the Domino Theory comes into play, just as when someone actually does shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater. We enlightened westerners are still a herd, a throng of lemmings. The letters illustrate that. It hasn't happened yet, we know what's up, and besides, individuals, even those considered to be living below the poverty line, are "richer" than most working class people were during and even before the arrival of the Great Depression. Couple that with the entitlement mentality of today's American and I can see the Nation's Capitol being stormed by cranky yuppies deprived of their daily caffeine taking the place apart.

So why not get the jump on the riot and simply start thinking and vote intelligently? We already know the current crop of Republicans,by and large are not our friends (and I am a Republican and an economic conservative who damns the Reagan and subsequent neocon approach to a "free" market and the culture of greed which has brought us to this pretty pass). We know we have to make a radical change in our approach to damn near everything to survive not only economically but physically on the planet, and it starts with cleaning house politically, as well as making major adjustments socially.

Aside from dong some serious study of the available Democratic Presidential candidates (and for taste-and-compare purposes, the Republican as well, so we can recognize precisely why we don't want him for the job); then start learning new ways to manage the herd. Start reading the works of Wendell Berry, Erich Fromm, James Howard Kunstler and, most especially, Greg Easterbrook (start with his "The Progress Paradox"). Throw in some Camus or Burroughs to keep your perspective on how bad things could get in a world run by idiots, then top it off with maybe Krishnamurti. Stop babbling and read and think.

Think. There's a neglected idea. We're rich. The least of us is wealthy. Sure, it's obscene that one per cent of us hold 20 per cent of the wealth, and we probably should eat the one-per centers if things get tight.

But it hasn't come to that yet and there is absolutely no reason to assume it will. Fear, dread, panic, yes, they are infinitely more fun -- but a calm assessment of how we might do things if we were smart, now there's a nice way to kill a weekend or two.

Besides, there's always a meteor with our name on it Out There somewhere.

Arthur Miller in his autobiography 'Timebends' said that in his opinion America is utterly invested in forgetting, and nowhere is this more evident than in their forgetting of the Great Depression. He said it was so much worse than it was portrayed to be in the years following and up until he was writing the book in the eighties. Nothing has changed since then. He wrote that Americans don't want to remember how bad it really was, they want to get past it, get over it and recreate it with a Hollywood glow. But the depression left his father a ruined man who never recovered, and he said he saw those people everywhere in his childhood and growing up.

This chimes with my mother's stories of the great depression in Australia. It was so bad she has never gotten over it. Still saving string, still feeling triumphant when she denies herself what she wants in order to save another ten cents, still afraid to stick her neck out in case her head gets bitten off. Her whole life has been limited by the trauma of humiliation, near starvation and privation she went through to get an education and get out.

Get out of debt is the answer, but how America is going to do that when it's fighting a war that's already costing THREE TRILLION DOLLARS worth of borrowed money is anyone's guess ...