Jackrabbit was a thoroughgoing Pollyanna, without the negative connotations that have come to surround that word. Life handed him a lemon; you can guess the rest. He found his bliss in the Canadian bush, teaching Nordic skiing, cutting cross-country trails, encouraging the development of ski areas north of Montreal, and persuading the local unemployed loggers to turn their hands and axes to the cause. Notoriously half-deaf, he occasionally took private clients for ski lessons, including one Mr. Hicks, who he was given to understand was quite famous. Unimpressed, Jackrabbit guided him all day and later discovered he’d been skiing with Tom Mix. He loved the company of beautiful women; at the end of my last interview with him, when he was only 106, he goosed Mother on her way out of the house.

I mention him in this instance only as an example of one reaction to very bad news. Our current economic condition sounds in many ways eerily like those of the late 20s: a period of euphoria; several years of falling real estate prices; farms and homes mortgaged for more than their value; banks overextended; overvalued stocks purchased on the margin. And finally the first doubts, leading to anxiety, and consequent selloffs that resulted in the bear market and the crash.

Jackrabbit would be bemused to notice that wealthy bankers and brokers are still leaping out of windows, but nowadays with parachutes. And you won’t find them in the Laurentians, either; more likely the Hamptons – in season.

Which leaves the rest of us wondering how this will all play out. We’re worried that it will get a lot worse, so we’re spending less, and driving a lot less. The people who sell us stuff and services aren’t making as much money as they were. They have to let people go. Unemployed people buy even less stuff. Everybody cuts back – universities, manufacturers, newspapers, charitable foundations – and we experience a downward spiral into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It may seem the height of insensitivity to say to a family that’s just lost its home in foreclosure proceedings, “Cheer up! Better days are coming.” A loss like that ranks on the stress scale nearly as high as the loss of an immediate family member. It’s an almost unmitigated calamity. And yet, when it happened to Mother and me once, about 23 years ago, that cheery Pollyannaish nostrum was exactly what I, at least, needed to hear (she was sure of it). The unanimity of purpose we experienced in our subsequent recovery is marvelous to remember. It reinforced what we’d always suspected: that when you’re up against it, and circumstances peel off your outer layers, as of an onion, you become what you’re capable of, for better or worse.

I often think, when I see a license plate with “Veteran” on it, “That guy wants us to know he’s a veteran, and wants to remember it himself, because that time – when he was part of a great outfit, and his life, perhaps, was in danger daily – that’s when he was at his very best.”

Many of us remember the years 1942 to 1945, when with an incredible effort, our nation fought and won a world war on two fronts on opposite sides of the globe. We were all in it together, from the servicepeople who fought; to Rosie the Riveter who manufactured munitions and built ships and planes; to us kids who collected lard, newspapers, metal, and milkweed pods. In the worst of times we were at our very best.

The same could be said of the Christian church during its early days under Roman rule; or Londoners during the Blitz of 1940-41; or the United States immediately (and, regrettably, briefly) after the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Years ago I was involved in an Outward Bound program at Dartmouth College. Among other exercises, we turned our undergraduate students loose in Boston, alone for three days with ten cents in their pockets. The idea was to see how creative each could be with the situation. One student let himself into his father’s pied-à-terre and used the dime to call his girlfriend. But my favorite was the student – now a town manager in the Connecticut Valley – who spotted a theater marquee with some blown-out bulbs and asked if he might have the job of replacing them. That was only the beginning; he ate regularly and returned with much more than a dime.

This one isn’t going to be as bad as the last one; even though Georgia and South Carolina are pretty dry at the moment, we probably don’t have a Dust Bowl on our doorstep right away. For now, we need to help anyone less fortunate than we to find the marquees with the blown-out lights. We need to remember that ultimately we’re all of us in the same boat.

Eleanor H. Porter, the author of the Pollyanna books, was a native of Littleton, New Hampshire. Every summer the town celebrates Pollyanna Glad Day in honor of her sunny contribution to our national consciousness. Jackrabbit would have loved it!