I say this facetiously but buy and watch The Waltons on DVD, seasons 1-9, throwing in a couple of the Thanksgiving specials for good measure.

I say facetious because if you have to watch The Waltons to get your sense of family values it may be too late. You see a family getting by in an idealized manner but basically through hard work by all members for a long long time - including child laborers working the orchards and any kind of job whenever they can. Money can be tight and mortgages and the taxman are a constant, so endless toil is the name of the game. Keeping your expensive data plan and the iPhone is unlikely, and we may find a new love for old school news papers and post offices as crucial social landmarks. College for everyone is also unlikely unless the family is extremely lucky and dedicated and the student exceptionally worthy of a scholarship. There are a thousand indignities and adjustments in a severe recession or depression, my family lived through the one in the 70s and 80s and we had our share together. But we all made it out alive, and intact, although scarred in that funky Reagan-era manner of permanent scarring. Big warning though, many families spun apart too.

The good news is that endless toil is approximately how we work our way out of the current financial mess, so your contributions will be welcomed by society. Which points to the second layer beyond strong family ties and commitments - church, schools, and whatever community you live in. You remember, places where you should already be investing your lives and evenings and your souls now. Because if you aren't, you're missing out. Whether that means attending PTA meetings and lending a hand in your kids' activities, volunteering places such as working the homelessness committee in your church, or sitting and witnessing and commenting and debating while your city council fritters away your tax dollars. Filling your time with work and effort instead of hours counting rounds in your ammo bunker or watching TV. Yes, these activities will also be the bedrock of our communities when times get tough, and they will see us through hard times. One observation I have of the current Occupy [Where ever] movement is that taken individually and as a collective, they don't appear to have invested very much in their communities, but surely have expectations for radical changes to them. So good luck with that - alot of the folks they purport to speak for may disagree with their motives, methods, and expected outcomes. Folks vested in their communities will tend to frown on outliers who come in with new ideas to replace their hard work and dedication wholesale.

The ties that bind - I contend they are stronger and more numerous than anything that we can imagine. Make those ties for yourself if you haven't already. Prepare: prepare your local community to better clothe, feed and shelter those who cannot now, because tomorrow you could be your own best customer. And get in the habit of treating folks with the same sense of compassion and dignity you want to be treated with, since someday it will be you needing assistance. We can't even imagine how many ties we already have in our lives until we really need them. Times get hard, and we see failure and assume we need a new diktat, a new bogeyman. But like every generation before us, we have seen the enemy and it is us. The ties that bind outnumber the bogeymen - we have nothing to fear but fear itself. We won't face roving bands of vagabonds off the set of Thunderdome, we'll have the same boring council meetings and the efforts of friends, family and neighbors all trying to piece together their communities in times of little or no money. We will see soup kitchens long before we see starvation in our splendid suburban isolations. And lots of sweat equity, because that's what sees us through hard times.