"Just remember," George Bailey cautions the panicky, wide-eyed, mini-mob in the midst of a run on the Building and Loan, "this thing isn't as black as it appears."

How black is this thing?

A slew of unhappy customers descended on the numerous Southern California branches of IndyMac bank today (Monday), following the news reports that federal regulators seized control of the troubled mortgage house on Friday.

Easy day for the press. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae conflated with IndyMac, roll tape of hot and bothered depositors standing in long lines outside a newly failed bank during a summer heat wave, and this story writes itself.

I am reminded of the reportage of the 1994 Northridge (Reseda) Earthquake, which I happened to experience up close and personal. You may remember the iconic picture in which a two-story apartment building in Reseda collapsed on itself, rendering a buffeted and compressed one-story structure. CNN ran that image with every one of its up-dates for several days, as did a lot of other news agencies. That visual became the emblematic image for most of news-watching America.

I cannot tell you how many times I have been asked sincere questions about my experience in that earthquake derived from that video. "Did your house collapse?" Based on that reporting, a huge number of news consumers in the Heartland unconsciously assumed that a vast majority of the people in the San Fernando Valley lost their homes to piles of rubble.

In truth, it was a devastating earthquake: seventy-two deaths, over 12,000 injuries, and $12.5 billion in damage. Depending on how you calculate, and your criteria, the so-called Northridge Quake can be ranked as one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history.

For the record, it was a big-time scary event, and we were shaken and inconvenienced for a long time following our 4:30 a.m. moment of terror. Power was out for several days in places (I never saw the CNN coverage everybody else watched because I was in the dark). Water was unreliable. There was visible damage everywhere. But very few of us were homeless, and very few of us were dead. Of a population of approximately 17 million residents in the Greater Los Angeles area, less than 100 of my fellow Angelenos died. Even seventy-two mortalities is a tragic number, indeed, but it always seemed to me that most of America had the sense from watching television that something much more catastrophic had transpired.

How black is this thing?

I really don't know--but things are generally not as bad as they seem on TV.

Is this financial crisis another Great Depression? I doubt it. But if it is, I suppose we will live through it the way our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents did. Were a lot of people in line at IndyMac today? Yes. Did it really happen? Yes. But let's keep some proportion to all this.

We should take these events seriously. There are in fact some very scary components to our current panic.

However, one quirky reason I continue to have faith in our potential for recovery is that politicians are not to the point of being frightened enough to refrain from seeking partisan advantage.

A number of Democratic legislators (many of whom are Obama cabinet hopefuls) blame the Bush administration and other appendages of the greedy Republican-Big Finance axis. The politicians bemoan the practice of "predatory lenders...luring potential homeowners into mortgages they could not afford." These mean lenders, the story goes, did not do due diligence and "take into account the borrowers inability to repay the loans."

Is it just me, or is that crazy?

It is the responsibility, and in the interest, of the lender to make sure borrowers can pay back loans. Bad credit risks don't get lured into buying homes against their better interest.

I get a house because a lender wants to make a loan and is not sufficiently cautious. Wooohooo! I pulled a fast one---and I am in control of my own destiny. I pay back the loan and I keep the house. It is a time-honored (and fairly accepted) practice in America to buy more house than you can afford.

Remember the days when you hoped and prayed to get your home loan approved, carting box loads of check stubs and personal financial records to your loan officer in hopes that he/she would smile on your application.

Every home loan is an opportunity.

This ubiquitous talking point seems tantamount to accusing employers of luring unqualified job seekers into high-paying, prestigious positions for which they are not prepared. It just strikes me as an odd way of looking at this set of facts.

In this case, obviously, people who bought houses on speculation are in trouble. Lenders who loaned money for a plethora of over-valued homes are facing serious consequences. The housing bubble collapse is very bad news to them--and, by extension, bad news for all of us. A go-go economy is fun for everyone while it lasts. A crash depresses all sectors of the community. In retrospect, these reckless lenders were foolhardy--and they generally have come to a fool's end.

But let's cut the election cycle hysterics and give a rest to the melodramatic storyline regarding the poor benighted ignoramuses suckered into buying nice homes by greedy lenders who only wanted to make a buck.

In conclusion, perhaps we should consider George Bailey's other words of comfort: "Let's stick together and resist panic and we can work through this thing."