I wonder what my grandfather thought was happening on October 29, 1929, the day the stock market crashed, ending the Roaring 20s and commencing, it turned out, the Great Depression.

Or what my father felt on December 7, 1941, as news broke that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, thrusting a complacent America into what became the Second World War.

I was just 10 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, 48 on 9/11, maybe my first adult moment of serious fear that my country was in serious trouble. 

This week was my second.

Watching the Wall Street meltdown, the sudden demise of companies that were once corporate giants, the floundering Congress and administration trying to save the entire financial system, I was angry, frightened, and confused.

Have the excesses of consumption and the greed of unbridled competition to make money at any costs combined to bring down a nation upon whom God had shed his grace, or so we had been told since grade school?

Have we, the baby boomers, screwed the pooch, allowing the country we  inherited from the greatest generation, to die on a bed of debt, created by a zeal to have it all - expensive homes, cars, appliances, vacations - right now.

I don't know how this is all going to end, whether the system is resilient and will right itself, or if we are going to have to suffer, as my grandparents did, for the exuberance they, and now we, have tolerated.

I hope not, but it's not as if we haven't earned it.