The smartest guy in the class may be under the burden of debt and unable to think his way out. He also may not have the ability to figure out what to do if he has to be in survival mode. Centuries of man’s existence has shown us that who’s smart and who’s not is a matter of where you are and what you need to survive or get ahead. These days the brilliant history professor may be a casualty while the guy who plants his own potatoes and fixes his own cars might be the smartest guy of all, someone who can teach us what to do next, when the financiers and intelligentsia or the intellectual elitist may not.

If the American middle class and the American dream is in the kind of jeopardy that Jeanna Bryner declares it is in her discussion on Live Science in October 2008, then we may need all the help we can get from those people who may be the smart ones. That’s because we have lost the generations that knew how to sew their own clothes and farm their own forty. Our farmers have been separated from the rest of us, propped up and struggling; and many people have long since left their farms to go into the cities to work.

There are those people in America’s outback, however, who didn’t move as fast into the 20th and 21st century and have kept their ways of life simple. Most of them are in the small towns of America, the Midwest and the South. That’s where the political opinions might be more to the right than some might find tolerable, but the people themselves are a marvelous resource for teaching us how to survive in hard times.

People in their 80s today can remember hard times, but they were so busy surviving them that to recall just how they did it might be difficult. On the other hand, there are enough of them around who are alert and capable, that we need to avail ourselves of their wisdom and advice. These are the people we shunted off to the corner, or corralled off when they turned 65. Those folks in country areas near or in small towns can lead the nation with their wisdom on how to get from here to there as some of the struggle begins. We need to find those people and put them to work advising some of the rest of us who need their survival wisdom.

So what can we learn from these people and how do we get to them. My suggestion is this: that every town put together a task force. That task force should consist of people who know how to do what we might call simple things the rest of us might not know. Then people can be taught those skills necessary to survive, from fixing cars, to fixing faucets and planting vegetables. It may be the idea that can save thousands of people who in desperation won’t know where to go or what to do. Let’s find those smart ones now and get busy learning from them.