For those of us whose introduction to the cold, cruel world didn't come last week, last month or even last year, America's current economic travails have a familiar feel. They might even elicit a dismissive shrug from our elders, the remaining ones who can conjure up memories of the terrible Depression.

Only the destruction and poverty that wracked the post-Civil War South topped the Depression on this country's scale of hard times. Those years amounted to a vicious hangover brought on by the excesses of the Roaring Twenties, when speculators ran amok trying to borrow their way from Wall Street to Easy Street.

When the crash came, people by the millions were hung out to dry in a climate of unregulated financial markets and doctrinaire capitalism. Oh, capitalism remains the best economic system, but it has to be tempered to keep ordinary families from being crushed by forces utterly beyond their control as companies rip and tear at each to survive. That was the blessed insight of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

Our technological and educational and entrepreneurial strengths came to the fore in the years after World War II, and America's prosperity became the model and envy of the world.

But fateful decisions were being made, driven by the imperatives of industries that were pillars of our economy but whose interests ultimately were at odds with that economy's long-term health.

Detroit was the global center of auto production. The United States was a country with plenty of elbow room and plenty of people eager to own their own piece of suburban or exurban paradise, and we bought cars by the multimillions to get there. Trucks traveling on an intricate web of taxpayer-funded highways emerged as the dominant means of moving freight.

The more dependent we became on our internal-combustion steeds, the more we tied our fortunes to the availability of oil. And as domestic supplies gradually were drawn down, we became gasoline junkies who had to turn to our friendly pushers overseas to fuel our habit.

With friends like these ... We found out in 1973 how much it hurt when the Mideast oil spigot was closed. Prices leapt and finding an open gas station was a simple matter of seeing which ones had lines of waiting cars that stretched around the block. One word captured the spirit of the times: bummer. Nobody enjoyed the replay in 1979.

If you wanted to buy a house along about 1981 -- the year my family moved to North Carolina -- you could consider yourself lucky (as we did) to lock in a 15 1/2 percent mortgage. Stratospheric interest rates were said to be the nasty-tasting cure for raging inflation, but it felt like the cure was worse than the disease.

The economic sun came out during the 1980s "Me Decade," the heyday of Reagan Republicanism. Americans put their malaise behind them and lived it up. Until, that is, the clouds rolled back in. My word association response for "early '90s" is "misery index." Bill Clinton noticed, and KO'd a sitting president.

It's cyclical, stupid: That might have been the reason for Clinton-era prosperity. But beginning with the dot.com bust circa 2000, ordinary business cycles have been trumped by dire events and bad judgment. Terrorist attacks, a drawn-out and monumentally expensive war, devastating hurricanes. A White House that's as enthusiastic about financial regulation as is a six-year-old faced with a mound of asparagus.

Onto all that layer 1) a record-shattering rise in oil prices, pushing the cost of a fill-up north of $50, and 2) an intertwined credit crunch and housing market collapse that has scads of Americans teetering toward foreclosure. And for many of the rest, equity is bleeding from their most valuable asset.

Then there's the minor matter of disappearing jobs as companies hunker down to ride out swollen energy prices and cheaper/faster/-better competition from abroad. It's not the Great Depression redux. We don't need our parents or grandparents to tell us that. But nobody wants things to get any worse just so we can see how much pain we can stand.

Our next president will have a mission that's simple to summarize, even if not simple to execute: Fix it. All of it. Housing. Jobs. Energy prices. Health care costs. And do it while safeguarding the country, protecting our allies, standing up for freedom.

Barack Obama will make the case that when what you're doing hasn't worked, try something else. John McCain will hold out the hope that when it comes to priming the economic pump, a light hand in Washington is the way to go. Perhaps it's not a second New Deal that America needs, but even McCain would do well to remember that in forging effective policies to restore our economy and renew our dreams, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

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