We’ve had plenty of it to cherish lately. The constant drumbeat of clashes and casualties in conflicts which seem to have no clear goals or ends has taxed the normal optimism of a great majority of Americans. The billions of dollars spent to prosecute those conflicts have ticked past like a cabbie’s meter until they almost seem to have lost meaning. If the military interventions were to end next week, the costs over the next several decades for veterans’ benefits and care will exceed even those of the military operations. And in all that, we’re dimly aware that we’re financing our lives on money borrowed from nations who hope to surpass us as global powers.

The recent “housing bubble,” in which would-be home owners and financial institutions bet on rising prices like grain futures – buying on the margin, if you will, as in 1929 – has been a calamity for many thousands of them. The generations that endured the Great Depression are no longer a part of our dialogue, and we’ve forgotten how bad it was, and could be again.

The United States is increasingly competing with developing nations for ever scarcer nonrenewable natural resources. It’s hard to believe it was 35 years ago – more than a generation – that America woke up to fuel shortages and gas lines as OPEC turned off the taps in the Middle East. Those of us who could split wood, did. We bought smaller, more efficient cars. We drove 55 miles per hour, which even the cops hated. We insulated our homes better and installed southside low-E glass windows.

Once again, we forgot. Our vehicles slowly grew. Soccer moms and bond traders felt they needed four-wheel-drive behemoths that would crush the other guy in a crash and carry them up the back side of El Capitan. Advertisers touted SUVs as the vehicles of necessity for upper middle-class families. Trent Lott’s Cadillac Escalade became the symbol of the last few years of America. I paid $3.97 a gallon today and felt as though I were getting away with something disreputable.

(I’ve just dug out my old gas record books and find that on September 17, 1957, I paid $3.30 in Brownwood, Texas, for 13.8 gallons of regular gas. A few years after that, when I was driving Beetles and gas was 32 cents a gallon, my fuel cost was a penny a mile. A Beetle’s top speed in calm air was about 70, which is all I’m doing now in order to save gas. They were almost as good as four-wheel-drive in snow and mud, and in a pinch you could pick up the front end and swing it around the other way. God! I wish they’d bring it back!)

Obviously, we’ve no shortage of conflict and calamity in our news. But I’ve noticed that as long as we remain spectators, we’re more titillated than affected; we find it exciting or deplorable. It’s when we’re personally enmeshed – and more and more of us, as the malaise moves up through the social classes, are enmeshed – that we finally begin to react to it, with rage, depression, or despair. People watching their deferred credit card debt slowly and necessarily climb beyond their ability to pay are perhaps in the worst shape. In addition, there are too many of us on the planet, battling over diminishing resources, and beginning to feel the effects of massive climate change.

Which leads, strangely, to the good news: We’ve always done our best under the worst conditions. Pearl Harbor found us woefully unready to take on the Empire of Japan in the Pacific; yet in less than four years we prevailed in a world war on two fronts and two continents. It was a rough four years. The United States lost over a million servicepeople. Rationing at home was strict; the President didn’t tell us to shop our way out of the jam. Rosie the Riveter led the women into the factories, where the hand that had rocked the cradle loaded munitions into rail cars. We kids collected newspapers, lard, scrap metal, and milkweed pods (for life vests; $3 a bushel for mature pods), and hauled home bags of scarce coal on our wagons and sleds.

I take great comfort these difficult days from Public Radio. Recent interviews with experts in alternative energy and innovative technology give some hope that we may again just pull our fat out of the fire. All agree there’s no silver bullet. Solutions will encompass a combination of radical conservation; locally peculiar wind, solar, hydro, tidal, and wave action power; rebuilding mass transportation; and a return to urban centers designed for people rather than vehicles. There’s no doubt we’ll have to make some dramatic changes.  Europeans, whose life styles are in many ways more salubrious than ours, use half as much energy. The main reason: its cost. Where laws, morals, and common sense fail, the economic imperative rules. Our lives will in some ways require better planning than they do now, and significant sacrifices; but in the words of an execrable patriotic song we sang during World War II, We did it before and we can do it again....We’ve got a heck of a job to do, but you can bet we’ll see it thru....We’re one for all and all for one! To sincerely doubt that belief is probably un-American. Yes, we can!