It's one thing for a president to feed hysteria, but it's pretty bad when a supposedly objective wire service like The Associated Press plays the same game. To quote an AP dispatch that appeared in the paper as straight news the other day (February 16, 2009) -- "Passage of the stimulus measure -- unprecedented in its cost -- was a triumph for Obama as he struggles to lift the country from a financial nosedive unseen since the Great Depression of the 1930s."

Unseen since the Great Depression. A little perspective, please. To restore it, just look around. Does this country look like those Walker Evans photographs of the utterly depressed Thirties?

Let's look at the numbers: In 2008, the American economy lost 3.4 million jobs. Painful. That's 2.2 percent of the labor force.

But from November of '81 to October of '82, 2.4 million jobs were lost -- a smaller number but just as great a percentage of the smaller labor force back then: 2.2 percent.

The unemployment rate last month (7.6 percent) was far below its peak in 1982: 10.8 percent. That's when the groundwork was being laid, thanks to dramatic tax cuts, for the Reagan Recovery, one of the longest-running booms in American history.

Comparisons to the 1930s are even less realistic. In the early '30s, jobs were being lost at triple today's rate. By the time FDR was inaugurated in 1933, a quarter of the country was jobless. Over 10,000 banks would fail that year compared to a couple of dozen last year. That number can't even compare to the more than 3,000 lost in the savings-and-loans debacle of 1987-88.

You bet times are tough. But this is a joyride compared to the Great Depression. And it is precisely because of the lessons learned in the 1930s, or that should have been learned in that decade of trial and error, that we'll pull out of this nosedive. Unless we all -- passengers, crew and control tower -- just throw up our hands in panic.

Maybe my lonely optimism is some kind of genetic defect. Or at least an acquired characteristic. I can remember my father recounting all the businesses he'd failed at in his younger days. A grocery store (just keeping inventory drove him crazy) and a laundry (he was stinkbombed out of business when he declined to pay protection money in Al Capone's Chicago), and even a restaurant (he loved being a host but couldn't take the hours).

But if he was broke from time to time, he was never poor, which can be more a state of mind than a balance sheet. Ben Greenberg may not have known what an entrepreneur was, given his third-grade education and immigrant-boy background, but he was one. After a childhood of privation in Poland, he never even noticed the Depression in this country. A congenital optimist, he was about the most American character I've ever known. If he failed at one pursuit, and he did at more than one, he'd succeed at another. Something would turn up. And it always did. Maybe because he was always looking for one. He couldn't pass a piece of land or an abandoned house without wondering if it was a good buy.

It's not as if life comes with any kind of guarantee; it's a gamble from conception. It's also a marvel. I wouldn't give up on America so fast. The economy will boom again, and then bust again. It's called the business cycle. Something will turn up. And when it does, a lot of folks who've just lost their job may look back on having to find another, or maybe a whole different line of work, as the best thing that ever happened to them.