For the most part we still retain a modicum of civility here, even when in panic mode.

In the Hurricane Ike gasoline panic, with gasoline snapping at the $4 a gallon level everybody panicked and ran to the nearest station to fill their tanks.

Police were called to direct traffic at Murphy Oil. The credit card system was overwhelmed and we were limited to premium gas at $3.92 a gallon, but there were no fist fights, no shouting, no car crashing. We maintained our civility and acted as though we were all in this together as victims of outside forces.

There was some panic shouting inside the pay booth as people didn't understand the new payment rules and the $40 limit per credit card, but we did not descend into the jungle, and nobody was trampled.

Given the alarm everyone felt, I'd give us all a B+ for maintaining cool under pressure.

We are old hands at weather alerts and simply drive to the nearest store and load up on bread, milk, bananas, junk food and beer just in case the forecast of trace amounts of snow turns out to be horribly wrong and we are marooned behind white drifts without power for a week or more.

We know in our hearts that it's a fool's exercise. If we were really facing a week without power we'd all pony up $500 apiece for a portable generator and two five-gallon cans of gasoline. That's something nobody ever thinks about.

I could start a new panic run on salr panels, but it would be my luck to spend $20,000 to go off the grid the week before a 10-mile asteroid hit the earth and created so much dust that we'd be without sunlight for an entire year.

Then there was the rumor that President-elect Obama was going to ban assault rifles. As panics go, this one was pretty mild. Not many of us have that much left on our credit cards to spend over $1,000 just before Christmas for an AR-15 to sit in the closet until Armageddon. We are all good enough hunters to know that the tiny caliber on assault rifles is not a reliable round to bring down a deer that could feed us.

Compared to Black Friday shoppers in Long Island, N.Y., we can take credit for being reasonable people. Our Wal-Marts here are open 24 hours so we don't need to mob up outside the store for what literally turned into a door buster, leading to the trampling death of a Wal-Mart associate.

New Yorkers are always looking down their noses at the rest of us, especially those hillbillies down south, but there has never been in all our history, dating back to the Hatfields and the McCoys, an incident in the South where a store worker was trampled by bargain seekers.

The irony is that a significant minority of people in the New York metro area don't celebrate Christmas, and the odds are great that many of them were just our there seeking bargains.

They got more than they bargained for, but kept on shopping. Now guess what? Some of those who contributed to this man's death are talking about suing Wal-Mart for not protecting them from themselves. I readily understand the suit of the victim's family, but if any shopper's lawsuit isn't thrown out for being frivolous there is no justice.

Next time you motion for the other drive to go first, take pride in being an ignorant hillbilly blessed with civility.

James Brooks is a long-time reporter for the Johnson City Press, from which this article is reprinted with permission of the author who owns copyright. Other ACR writings of his may be found through the site's XYZ Index. He is an avid conservationist and an author with one published novel also.