As Holly Golightly pointed out, there are rats and there are super rats. And these days there are so many rats it’s hard to tell who’s the rattier. The financial sleazebags with their empty promises and empty bank accounts? The toxic mortgage hustlers? The arrogant, bloated CEOs who continue to frolic?

If you’re looking for someone to blame this mess on, there are plenty of rats to go around. Maybe even those politicians who had to be excused from high office for not paying their taxes.

But don’t get mad at your neighbor. Don’t blame the luckless homeowner who bought at too high a price with too little money down. A lot of us did that, but got away with it…at least, so far. This is no time to be throwing rocks at glass houses, considering so many of us are living in them.

And don’t get mad at unions for providing workers a decent enough wage so that teachers and police officers and nurses can live in the same town where they work. And don’t bully the business owners not as savvy as you, who didn’t have the financial cushion to get through hard times.

The worst thing that could happen to this country – worse than a Depression and double digit unemployment – is that we turn on each other. And America the once Strong and Proud becomes America the Stingy and Spiteful.

The rats are happy to see us mice picking on each other.

What good comes from being mean and reckless, calling people “losers,”  like those high profile windbags who stir up an anxious populace. The ones who claim that mortgage reform plans only encourage bad behavior. And who, worse, become part of that still tiny but screeching minority that seem to want President Obama’s ideas to fail so they can do… what? Say goodbye to “hope?”

It’s easier to understand why common people buy houses they can’t afford than it is to understand how the biggest money brains in the world made such colossal blunders to cause a global financial collapse. We all wanted our piece of paradise even though everyone said the housing bubble would burst. But the realtor said it was a deal, the appraiser said it was worth it and the lender said you qualified. So tell me where to sign those loan papers, which would be sold to another lender the next day.

Americans may get annoyed with the excesses of the rich but they take personal affront at the bad luck of the poor. And don’t think that the rats aren’t happy to see us mice picking on each other.

I think this is a test. We can grumble and point fingers or we can tighten our collective belts and get through this crisis without hurting each other. We can believe that, “We will rebuild and we will recover,” as President Obama said in his speech to Congress. And we can do it in a neighborly fashion. Trade our backyard tomatoes for eggs from the guy with chickens down the street.

Getting mad, even at rats, gets us nowhere.