You're blissfully hurtling down a desolate stretch of interstate at 70 mph, singing along with your iPod. The scenery is spectacular, the sun is shining, and things couldn't be better. Then you round a bend and suddenly the sky turns midnight black. There's lightning and a thunderclap that feels like it comes from your back seat.  There's a trickle of rain, followed seconds later by a downpour, then hail. The highway isn't desolate any more, as you've caught up to all other drivers who are crawling along at 10 mph because they can barely see 50 feet. What do you do?

Many U.S. adults do exactly the wrong thing, contradicting the advice given by the National Weather Service and potentially putting themselves and their families in serious danger.

The American road trip is as much a part of our nation's fabric as apple pie and baseball. Nothing restores the soul like remembering how big and beautiful this land is. It's important to remember that road trips are more journey than vacation, however. Things can and do go wrong.  Bad weather is at the top of that list.  You simply can't drive coast to coast without hitting a few bad storms. 

Bob Sullivan / msnbc.com

A rainbow graces Detroit's skyline on Wednesday.

I love summer rain during a road trip.  It smells incredible, and it can lower oppressive outside temperatures drastically.  There's often a rainbow to enjoy when the storm is over.  And the best part: If you don't like the weather, keep driving. No doubt, things are different when you clear the next mountain range, or when you out-drive the storm.

I'm talking about tame rain, however. Plenty of east and west coasters might not be familiar with the more intense storms that regularly pelt the middle of the country, like Arizona's afternoon monsoons. And there's no denying that driving through a tornado warning is harrowing experience.  So here's some basic road trip advice on handling extreme weather.

Most drivers will only have to deal with some heavy rain during a typical trip, and the advice there is standard: move over, slow down, don't have bald tires and leave plenty of extra following distance. Each day this week, I've driven through at least two bad downpours, but neither one lasted more than 30 minutes. That's pretty typical.

Dealing with more extreme weather is really an information problem: Should I leave the hotel now or wait two hours until the storm has passed?  That story is mixed now: On one hand, there are all manner of Internet enabled gadgets to help us predict the weather. On the other hand, it's harder to hear emergency warnings about extreme weather because many iPod-loving drivers don't listen to their radios any more. That's why, if you're driving and there's any sign of ominous clouds, it's best to turn off your tunes, find a local station and listen for weather alerts.

Of course, radio station consolidation and the proliferation of national networks like ESPN Radio has made finding local stations harder in the middle of the country. Those stations will still play emergency messages, but you won't get earlier warnings from local DJs who know the weather better. That’s why it's still worth spinning around the dial -- sampling local radio is one of the treats of cross-country trips, anyway.

It's not always clear what to do with emergency warnings, however.  Recently I was caught in a very violent thunderstorm storm cell, with cloud-to-ground lightning all around me, and the emergency broadcast system warning me to “stay inside.”  Adding to my dilemma, I was stuck in traffic on a highway and had nowhere to go. What would you do?

You're still much more likely to be in a car accident than to be hit by lightning, even in this situation, so handling the car safely is your first concern.  If you can pull off the road safely and wait out the worst of the rain, that's probably a good idea.  Flooding is likely your second-biggest worry, so don't park in a depressed area, such as under an overpass. 

What about that lightning? You've probably heard at some point that the rubber tires on your car can save you from electrocution by a direct lightning strike because they act as a ground.  That's not true.  The car itself however can act as what's called a "Faraday Cage," dispersing the electric charge around the metal shell of the car. 

That's great, unless you happen to be touching metal in the car when the strike hits, such as a steering wheel or stick shift.  There are reports of police officers getting bad mouth burns because their squad car was struck while they were talking on their radios.

So what's the best advice for sitting out a lightning storm in your car? Stay in the vehicle, turn the ignition off and keep your hands in your lap, says the National Lightning Safety Institute. Don't lean on the car door, and never step out of the car.

Far less likely -- but certainly possible -- is an encounter with a tornado. Again, your best defense is information: Listen to local radio for specific areas that are under tornado watches or warnings. 

Because tornados can pack an almost unimagineably violent force -- they can lift and throw entire buildings -- there are no sure-fire safety tips for dealing with them. There also is a difference of opinion about the best course of action if you encounter a tornado  while driving. 

All agree that abandoning the car to enter a strong shelter is your best bet. On the open road, however, that might not be possible.  Professional storm chasers do outrun tornados in their vehicles -- their trick is to drive away from the storm at a right angle, to the south if possible (the north side of the storm will be pelted with hail.)  An emergency memory trick for this maneuver is to directly face the storm, and then turn 90 degrees to the right.

Tornados can travel 60 mph or faster, however, and everyday drivers may put themselves at greater danger by attempting to outrun a storm. The controversy surrounds the two bad options that remain: staying in the car with the seat belt on and bend below the windshield, or abandoning the car and laying down in a ditch. 

Both ideas have merit. The car will provide protection from objects thrown violently by the storm. Even if the car is thrown by the twister, it will provide some impact protection. On the other hand, a driver who finds a deep ditch well below ground level should be safer from violent winds as the storm passes. Ideally, it should be far from the abandoned car, which could be hazardous if it's thrown. Also, beware of possible flash flooding in the ditch. 

The National Weather Service and the American Red Cross recently advised drivers that each option has its benefits, and drivers in a crisis should consider both:

"If flying debris occurs while you are driving, pull over and park. Now you have the following options as a last resort," they said in a joint statement.(PDF) "Stay in the car with the seat belt on. Put your head down below the windows, covering with your hands and a blanket if possible. If you can safely get noticeably lower than the level of the roadway, exit your car and lie in that area, covering your head with your hands."

For more tips on driving in tornados, click here and here.

Whatever the weather, staying calm is the key to making good choices, and information can really help. I'm a big fan of the Weather.com iPhone (or Android) app, which gives you hour-by-hour weather predictions and -- more important -- up-to-the-minute radar maps showing precipitation amounts.  They make it easy to see if the storm you're in is a five-minute interruption by Mother Nature or a two-hour beast that you'd be better riding out in a hotel room. I find it indispensible. 

Most of all, don't rush: build in extra time for your trip. That way, you'll have the option to make the safer, more conservative choice if you need to, without worrying about missing grandma's turkey dinner.

What are your tips for bad-weather road trip driving?

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Bob Sullivan / msnbc.com

Esther Shapiro, with part of her beloved Shakespeare collection in the background. Ask her about consumer protection and she is likely to respond with some blank verse.

IN A BEAUTIFUL GARDEN, DETROIT -- To call Esther Shapiro the Ralph Nader of Michigan is to compliment Ralph Nader. 

The arc of her life runs perfectly parallel to the birth, life, and near death of America's consumer movement -- in fact, you might call her its grandmother.  Now 93, Shapiro still lists herself as a "consumer consultant" in the phone book. But she frets about the state of the economy, the fate of her beloved Detroit, but most of all, about the lack of effective consumer protections across America.

From 1974 to1988 she ran Detroit's forward thinking Office of Consumer Protection, perhaps the most active agency of its type in the country. She had real power; she could revoke a firm's business license if it misbehaved, she could bar it from advertising in Detroit newspapers. She had a regular radio segment and newspaper column. She filed lawsuits, got refunds for jilted consumers, and -- with the help of her police commissioner husband -- put bad guys in jail. By the time she was forced to retire at age 80, she had vast files on every possible consumer scam -- and a heart full of stories from grateful consumers who she'd helped.

Early in her career, she helped stop a widespread scam run by criminals who took deposits from people desperate for leads on cheap apartments, then never furnished the leads. She was able to get refunds for some victims, and told me about one woman who showed up to collect her money.

"She just kind of grabbed it, like you would grab food if you were hungry. Then she said to me, 'Do you know what it's like to be a welfare mother and be cheated out of your last dollar?’ And walked away. That really stuck with me," Shapiro said.

Stories like those fueled her long hours, her endless lectures to community groups, and they still fuel her when frustrated consumers track her down through the phone book.

They call because no one really does her kind of work anyone. After Shapiro left, the consumer agency died a slow death. Her files were thrown away, she said, her eyes tearing up.

"For a while if you called the number, there was just a message that said this inbox is full," Shapiro said. "There's no place for people to call now."

Shapiro has called Detroit home for more than 50 years, and has lived just a few blocks outside the hardscrabble downtown area for the past 40.  A Chicago native, she met her husband in New York and lived in Vancouver, Wash., during World War II, but fell in love with the motor city after her husband landed a job there as a union organizer in the 1950s. She has raised a family tree of do-gooders -- a grand-daughter in Seattle who fights for immigrant construction workers' rights, a daughter who's active in the Women in Black peace movement.  In fact, her secret shame in the Shapiro family is that "I'm the only one who's never been arrested. They tease me about it all the time."

Talking with Shapiro, you get the idea that she still has plenty of time for that. I met her via email five years ago when writing about the death of price tags on consumer products – she’s still the nation’s most persuasive apologist for price tags and product labeling as a source of consumer protection, and I have interviewed her several times since.  But we hadn’t met face to face until I made the pilgrimage to Detroit on Wednesday.

She's a bit unsteady on her feet these days, but still manages to scramble out to her perfect, tiny garden on request and has no trouble reciting entire scenes from Shakespeare plays during a pesky reporter's camera sound check. 

But she turns gravely serious when talking about the people she used to help.

"I'm very worried about the future," she said. "In essence there is no consumer protection today. There are still laws on the books, but the enforcement isn't there. Nobody has the lawyers to do it themselves, the local organizations that are supposed to enforce don't do it. ... There are things on the books that would solve a lot of these consumer problems. But there is no one to enforce them or teach them."

America's consumer protection movement reached its heyday in the early 1970s, when Ralph Nader was one of America's most recognized figures.  Almost all real help is local, however -- anyone who's every complained to a federal banking regulator can attest to that -- so various states and cities created their own activist consumer agencies at the time. Detroit's agency, and Shapiro, were a model for the country. That's why the destruction of her files -- and the shuttering of her agency -- hurts so much.

"I thought that was going to be my legacy," she said. 

But even though her movement has run out of steam for now, Shapiro has a rich personal legacy.

"I run into people all the time who say things like, 'I remember you, I still have that article you wrote on how to shop for shampoo,' " she said.  “People tell me they always look at labels when they buy things because they heard me speak. … It gives my life meaning."

Shapiro doesn't tour the speaking circuit like she used to, but she still makes occasional appearances -- in fact, she was on Detroit's NBC affiliate on Wednesday morning.  And she still has plenty of sage advice for consumers, who she says are still falling for essentially the same scams they did 50 years ago.

"We don't learn our lesson because we don't want to," she said. "We seize upon the immediate. ...Someone who sounds knowledgeable and offers to solve your problems, you're going to take it and not ask questions because you don't want the answers, you just want the solution."

But the persistence of the current recession, which by now has squeezed many people out of their life savings and left them with no margin for error, plays a big role in the vulnerability of consumers, she said. She thinks consumers are worse off today than they were in 1974, when her agency opened.

"There's a sense of desperation. We're vulnerable, we're bleeding and there's nothing to stop the bleeding," she said.  "I think things are worse because there's less hope. Nobody really believes that employment is going to pick up because we don't see it. No one really believes the stock market is going to recover. I think no one really believes that we'll ever have peace because we're always in a war.  It's this desperation that tears apart whatever we might have built up in defense."

Shapiro's dark words will sound familiar to anyone who's spent time listening to a worried grandmother ("What kind of world am I leaving those kids?" she said several times.)  But her sparking eyes and quick smile -- not to mention her sharp wit and persuasive abilities -- belie her stated pessimism. Shapiro has a deep, abiding faith in the rule of law, and in fairness. And it's clear that deep inside, she thinks fairness will come back into fashion again some day.

"I learned in a high school science class that nothing is every totally destroyed or disappears," she said. "You light a fire to destroy something, but then you have gases, you have ash that stay with the planet. Something is always there. It's never totally lost, and that's what gives me hope. We offer education, we hope someone will hear it, we know it's not going to be lost. That's my faith."

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AT SOUTH STREET COFFEE SHOP, WILMINGTON, OHIO -- When you visit a town of 12,000 people that recently lost 10,000 jobs, you'd expect to find a lot of things:  boarded up homes, abandoned gas stations and empty storefronts to name a few.

What I found in Wilmington, Ohio, was something I didn't expect: opportunity. 

Bob Sullivan / msnbc.com

Mark Rembert is among the youngest Chamber of Commerce presidents in the nation. He says the city's economic misfortune has created opportunity, too.

Small town America has struggled with brain drain since the invention of the automobile. But as it attempts to rise from the ashes of an economic nightmare, this 200-year-old town may have discovered a revolutionary way to attract and keep its young people.

For decades, this small town in southwest Ohio served as crossroads for travelers shuttling between Kentucky and Detroit.  It now sits at a crossroads of the American economy. Every day since the massive DHL package facility that employed the majority of Wilmington's residents closed in 2009, the town has had to ask itself: Will this disaster destroy us, or be our rebirth?

Wilmington has become America's small town in the past three years, a media darling because the recession hit here with almost unmatched brutality.  Jay Leno has been here, and so have "60 Minutes" (twice), Rachel Ray and Glen Beck. It is the lead anecdote in a story about America's disappearing small towns.

There's good reason for that. The discussions taking place on Main Street or in the coffee house may be about local issues, but in the voices of Wilmington's faithful, you hear America talking. 

"Guess I got to be a young man again and work graveyard shifts," said one man sitting at a table without coffee.  He's not young. 

But when you talk to people of Wilmington about their downtrodden state, about their grave misfortune -- and if you are rude enough to ask where the burned out buildings are -- people laugh.

"You're not going to find people crying on the sidewalks here," said Molly Dullea, who operates the General Denver Hotel in downtown Wilmington.  Her brisk pilot crash pad business dried up when DHL ceased operations, but she replaced that with rollicking open mic nights and "draft" beer parties. "We are all taking care of each other here."

Even international media has descended on this place, sometimes labeling it a "ghost town."  

Don't tell that to Roger Walker, who just opened South Street Coffee Shop down the block from the General Denver.  He's living the American dream, leaving his job in Vandalia, Ill., to take the risk of a lifetime.

Bob Sullivan / msnbc.com

Roger Walker just opened a coffee shop in the heart of Wilmington.

"The time was right," Walker said. So was the rent -- about one-tenth the price of similar space in a big city.  "We came here and just fell in love with this town." 

For Mark Rembert, returning to Wilmington was more like reconnecting with an old high school girlfriend after college.  Rembert, who graduated from Wilmington High School in 2003,  was working for an international PR firm in Philadelphia when the DHL disaster struck. After some soul searching, he moved home to try to help.

Within a few months he was running a nonprofit economic development agency and, soon after, became president of the Chamber of Commerce. National TV appearances followed, as did speaches at major conferences, including TED, and awards from places like MTV. 

"If I stayed in Philadelphia I never would have had the opportunities I've had here. It would have taken years for me to get this far," said Rembert, 26.  "And it's all became of Wilmington, and I couldn't be more grateful."

Other young people have picked up on the opportunities, too, helped by a program called Clinton Community Fellows -- Wilmington is in Clinton County.  Students or recent graduates are matched with local businesses where they offer free consulting -- the students receive a stipend from a nonprofit agency at the end of the summer. These are no token work-study programs. Local shop owners are eager to hear any suggestions for saving their business, and the students bring with them fresh ideas like social media marketing.

"I've had responsibilities here I never would have gotten at in internship in Chicago or in New York," said Kelsey Swindler, who's working at a small publishing company. Until recently, she was known as the florist's daughter. "People want to try new things, they need to try new things. ... Who knew my Facebook knowledge would be so valuable."

Dessie Buchanan used to be known simple as "Dr. Buchanan's daughter" around town.  Now, she heads one of Wilmington's most important ventures, as executive director of the farmer's market program.  In this town, "buy local" isn't just a slogan, it's a lifeline.  Buchanan persuaded farmers to move their market into the center of town and expand it to two days per week, and worked with the county so that social service food aid money could be used to pay for fruits and vegetables sold at the market.

"At first they didn't believe in my ideas, but each time something goes well, they listen a little bit more," she said.

Even Dullea swears that possibilities created by the closing of the DHL plant are a godsend -- the farmers market now takes place adjacent to her hotel, right before open mic night, which sometimes attracts 100 people – up from a dozen or so before the crisis. 

"We are better off now," she said, without a hint of doubt in her voice.

That doesn't mean there isn't a whole lot of money missing from this town. The economic swing it has endured is hard to put in perspective. In 2004, German shipping firm DHL purchased what was then Airborne Express as an entree to the U.S. shipping market.  Wilmington's massive airfield, built for U.S. military jets during the cold war, was the largest private airport in the nation, served as an alternate landing site for the space shuttle and was the perfect place to expand into the dot-com fueled shipping business.  At one point, the city essentially had a negative unemployment rate, and DHL bused in part-time workers from counties all over Ohio to help sort packages.

In 2008, it all came crashing down. Mayor David Raizk said one in three households lost income when DHL left. The number of people receiving food assistance from county social services jumped from about 1,500 five years ago to 8,000 today, said Buchanan.

It's Kevin Carver's job to figure out how to fill up the 1,900-acre abandoned plant.  There's no putting a lipstick on that pig. It's now a spooky graveyard of hundreds of DHL airplanes with engines removed, awaiting recycling.  The airpark still operates, with a small airplane repair business and pilot training program. It lands six or seven jets per week -- down from 150 per day.  But every week, a steady stream of investors come to kick the tires on the facility and its hundreds of massive loading docks.  Some of its buildings are nearly brand new.

Bob Sullivan / msnbc.com

Finding someone to fill the enormous vacant DHL airport facility is Kevin Carver’s problem. He heads the Clinton County Port Authority which now owns the site.

Carter, executive director of the Clinton County Port Authority, has one big thing going for him: before DHL left, it gave the airport to the city, which now controls its future.  The town is currently studying the best route to redevelopment.

Mayor Raizk was raised at the town's Quaker-founded college, where his father was a teacher and athletics coach. The school's gym even bears his father's name.  He's had to channel his dad's inspirational abilities many times during the current crisis.

"When you're at a small school, you may not have the best talent, so when you're losing by 20 points you have to really pull together and play for each other," he said.  His job is far from over. Unemployment has stabilized, and local businesses say they've gotten used to the new normal ... getting by with less.  But if the crisis were a 24-hour day, with DHL's withdrawal acting as midnight, Raizk says it'd be about 6 a.m.

"The sun is coming up," he said. "But there's a lot of work to do."

Like every small town I've ever visited, Wilmington has many outsized claims to fame. The city of Denver was named after former Wilmington resident General James William Denver, who also lent his name to the hotel. The town's old-style Murphy Theater opened in 1918, built by former Chicago Cubs owner Charles Murphy. They say he paid for it with World Series winnings from 1908 -- the last time the Cubs won (perhaps that's why there is not a newer theater. Some residents claim the banana split was invented here, too.

But if Wilmington can figure out how to survive and thrive in its economic disaster, and hang on to its youth in the process, it will have given America something far more remarkable than a new dessert.

"Can we take this crisis and make this community relevant? We want to be the community that inspires people across the country," said Rembert. "If we turn this around, we will be."

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AT A BUS STOP, IN PITTSBURGH -- Like nearly every other city in America, after three hard recessionary years, the fiscal gyrations of robbing Peter to pay Paul have pretty much been exhausted in Pittsburgh. 

Bob Sullivan / msnbc.com

Public transpoortation was one of the reasons that Jon Robison, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, moved to his east Pittsburgh neighborhood five years ago. But severe bus service cuts mean he's now often stranded as crowded buses pass him by.

Hard decisions about government services are now unavoidable, and the city's Port Authority transportation agency made one the hardest in March -- cutting 29 bus routes and reducing service on 37 more.  Far more severe cutbacks that would have slashed bus service by one-third were stalled by a one-time time cash windfall, but the clock is ticking on those Draconian budget measures designed to plug a $50 million budget gap. Steeper bus cuts are set for 2012, unless millions in new revenue magically appears.

For Jon Robison, the numbers are much more tangible.

"Some days, one, two, even three buses pass me by because they are too full," Robison said.  "So even if you still have bus service, the buses are overcrowded."

Robison, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, relies on public transit to get around. Bus access is one of the reasons the 67-year-old moved with his wife to the east Pittsburgh neighborhood of Oakland five years ago.  He's even president of the transit service's public advisory board. But that doesn't mean he’s exempt from being left waiting in his wheelchair on the sidewalk when a bus flies by that doesn’t have room for him.

"I keep saying if the Legislature won't fund buses, at least it could legalize hitchhiking," he said. 

In a sense, Robison is lucky – none of his bus routes have been eliminated.  Some Pittsburghers in farther out neighborhoods have lost service entirely. Late-night service was hit particularly hard, and it took swing-shift workers with it.

One downtown office building security guard I interviewed said he works from 4 p.m. to midnight, and the service cuts eliminated the 12:20 bus -- the last bus.

“I don’t know why they didn’t cut a bus in the middle of the day that no one would notice,” he said. “Losing that last bus really hurt.”  He said he knows some employees who’ve had to quit.  For him, taking a taxi home at night adds $200 to his monthly transit costs, a significant bite out of his salary. He couldn't afford to lose the job, however, which is why he requested anonymity.

Driving isn't such a great option either. Pittsburghers just trying to get to work feel like they're being hit on all sides by city and county governments that seem to have an insatiable appetite for new fees.  Prices at city-operated parking garages have doubled in recent years.  Sidewalk meter rates jumped 100 percent, too-- a quarter now only gets you seven minutes. Meanwhile, stickers hastily placed on parking signs all over town antagonize drivers further, announcing meter enforcement now runs until 10 p.m., four hours earlier than the old 6 p.m. cutoff. And parking ticket enforcement agents are everywhere.

"I know that it hurt many of the people I work with currently ... because now we have no option but to pay to park in a parking garage," said Bernard Rafferty, who works at a bank. "And I am sure that there has been a hit to evening business downtown with enforcement until 10."

Frustration over this big squeeze reaches a boiling point for some residents, however, when discussion turns to construction of the new passenger rail transit tunnel. The $500 million project will connect the city's North Shore to downtown, and help move fans to sports stadiums and casinos north of the Allegheny River.  The federal government is picking up most of the tab; still, commuters are frustrated that millions are being spent on what critics have labeled a "tunnel to nowhere," while a fraction of that spending could have spared the city's bus system.

Throwing sand in the face of frustrated bus riders was Sen. John McCain's ranking of the Pittsburgh transit tunnel as No. 3 on a list of projects partially funded by the 2009 fiscal stimulus bill passed by congress that are wasting taxpayer money.  

But Brian O'Neill, revered Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist and author of The Paris of Appalachia, takes a much longer view of the project.

"This is a common criticism, but we're talking about two different pots of money. The federal government paid 95 percent of the construction costs of this project, and if it didn’t go here it would have gone someplace else,” he said. “And if you ever wanted light rail to extend further north you've got to get it across river somehow. ... But this came at bad time because it's a huge amount of money, and a smaller amount would have saved the buses."

Pennsylvania had another idea to save the buses -- it was going to turn Interstate 80 into a toll road, but the U.S. Department of Transportation rejected that idea in April 2010. That leaves the system running with a yawning budget gap, little hope in sight and few ideas for a new dedicated funding source.

How did things fall so far, so fast, in Pittsburgh? The refrain should sound familiar to most cities.  The Port Authority which runs the system now spends just as much -- $32 million a year -- on health care for retired employees as for current employees.  Healthcare and pension costs have risen at an annual rate of 22 percent in the past 10 years. The agency describes these costs as a "death spiral."

"Nothing ever gets done until there's a crisis," O'Neill said. "So here's the crisis."

These unsustainable increases aren't the systems' only problem; but failure to get a handle on them will undoubtedly lead to more service cuts -- and more crowded buses leaving Robison on the sidewalk in his wheelchair, late for his next appointment in town.

“It’s a drag but it’s a natural consequence of a shortage of funding,” he said. “There just isn’t enough money to go around.”

In Washington D.C., with a full tank of gas -- Mark Rembert isn't just fighting for Wilmington, Ohio. He says he's fighting for the survival -- in fact, the very soul -- of small town America. 

Rembert, 26, graduated from Wilmington High School in 2003 and moved away to find opportunity. But five years later, a different kind of opportunity emerged back home.   

If you look at a recession scorecard, you'll see that Wilmington is the hardest-hit town in Clinton County, which is the hardest hit county in Ohio, which is among the hardest-hit states in the union. The basics are simple – Wilmington, a quaint place in southwestern Ohio not far from the Kentucky border,  has 12,000 residents and, in 2008, delivery firm DHL closed its 10,000-job operation in the town's air park. But Rembert, who had opportunities in places like New York or Philadelphia, decided to go home to try to save his small town. He now heads the county Chamber of Commerce and is part of a development fund trying to attract new businesses to Wilmington.

Rembert’s battle is a fight you'll find all across America, as the nation's economic malaise settles into to its third year and the dreaded double-dip recession looms. At this crucial juncture in the U.S. battle to get out of the quicksand laid by the burst of the housing bubble in 2008, msnbc.com's Red Tape Chronicles is taking a second annual road trip across the country. We'll visit small, medium, and large towns, and listen to people tell their stories of trying to get ahead -- or stay afloat -- while the dual pressures of dogged unemployment and government spending cutbacks continue to turn the screws.

 Extreme times bring out the best -- and worst -- of human nature. We'll look for both. There will be stories of inspiration, like Rembert's never-say-die spirit. There will be tales of shame and inhumanity, as we'll find in Chicago, when we talk to families who have spent more than three years trying to beat back the red tape involved in trying to save their homes from foreclosure.  We'll see the reality of budget cuts in Pittsburgh, where mass transit cutbacks and parking meter price hikes are suffocating commuters just trying to make it to work on time. We'll meet a 94-years-young woman who still acts as a consumer advocate for the people of Michigan, and a 22-year-old in Omaha who's among the best in the world at warning kids about the dangers of identity theft.

At each stop during our two-week journey from Washington, D.C., to Seattle, we'll talk to people who have taken on their own version of Rembert’s cause.

"When the crisis hit, it was very personal," Rembert told me. "At that moment, the very future of our community was called into question. And we had to ask the hard question: Why do we care about the future of this place?"

In a way, Wilmington is lucky.  It's calamitous economic fate brought the town outsized notoriety. The news magazine "60 Minutes" profiled it two years ago, and NBC "Tonight Show" comedian Jay Leno came to give a free concert and community pep talk.  Since then, a steady stream of mass media has parachuted in, looking for Wilmington to serve a bit as a weather vane for the rest of small town  America.

There are success stories -- a new downtown coffee shop just opened on South Street last month, and we'll meet the man who took the risk of opening a new business in a town rocked by job loss. 

But it's unfair to place the bellwether burden on Wilmington.  Even Rembert, whose infectious enthusiasm has managed to draw the attention of Fox host Glen Beck, admits he doesn't have many answers yet.

"Other towns call us looking for a formula they can apply to their town. We don't have one," he said.

But he does have plenty of ideas; ideas about self-sustaining communities that produce and consume what they need; ideas about the importance of having sense of place, and why Americans must return to understanding how "hometown" and "identity" are inextricably linked.  He doesn't want every 21-year-old in every small town in America to face the choice of leaving home for opportunity in the city or staying home and facing economic suicide. 

And besides, most people are stuck where they are now, anyway. With one-third of American homeowners "under water," the 1990s concept of extreme labor portability is basically dead.  People can't move for job opportunities now because they can't sell their homes.  In a new, forced version of community stability, Americans have to figure out how to be happy where they are.  That might be a surprising stroke of good luck, Rembert says.

"There is a renewed sense of the fight for place in America," he said. "Small towns are a great place to start because, while they might be poor in resources, they are rich in social capital."

During the next two weeks, we hope to tap into some of that social capital, and to take the temperature of the America that lives between the coasts.  I hope you'll come along for the ride. 

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While there seems to be an epidemic of data theft lately, red tape surrounding release of data to legitimate groups might threaten our ability to learn about real-world epidemics.

It seems that everyone and anyone is stealing your data recently. Companies as diverse as  Sony, Lockheed Martin and Citibank have all been forced to admit hackers had their way with their computers. Meanwhile, the Chinese government has been accused of hacking Google.

But one group can't seem to get its hands on data -- health researchers who are supposed to be able to get it.

Matt Walsh is an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Population Health Sciences. He's one of thousands of researchers around the country who construct government-sponsored health research projects that require access to large sets of population data. For example, if researchers are studying the impact of exercise on breast cancer patients, they need to identify a control group from the general population to pair up with the experimental group.  It's no small task -- a scientist might need to find 100 50-year-old women in a small geographic area who don't smoke and are of average weight.

Traditionally, this has been done by picking through databases provided by state motor vehicle agencies, which tend to be the largest repositories of population information available. Census data is more complete, but usually isn't available for years, and then it's stale.

 But in recent years, Walsh noticed that it was become harder and harder to obtain government driver license lists. So instead of studying the health effects of a new drug or a virus outbreak, he decided to study access to government driver license data. His results -- published this month in the American Journal of Epidemiology -- show that in about half the country, epidemiologists are out of luck.

"It ends up costing the taxpayers more because we have to do additional procedures to find control groups," Walsh said. "The irony is data brokers and other people who shouldn't have access to the data still find a way to get it."

This research red tape dates back to the late 1980s, when there was a celebrated case of data abuse involving the death of actress Rebecca Schaeffer. At the time, many states would sell license lists to marketers and others as a source of revenue. But a deranged fan purchased Schaeffer's private information from the California Department of Motor Vehicles, stalked her, and killed her. 

Congress responded in 1994 with the Drivers Privacy Protection Act, which made most forms of sale or sharing of the information illegal. As the law took effect during the next several years, exceptions were carved out for government agencies performing their normal function-- law enforcement agencies are an obvious example. So is government-sponsored health research.  States can also obtain express consent from residents, and then sell or share their data.

But the law, and a few subsequent big-dollar lawsuits, have made many states gun-shy. That anxiety is obvious  in Walsh's study.

Over the past two years, he asked every state motor vehicle agency if -- under hypothetical research conditions -- it would release driver data to him.  From a researchers' point of view, the findings were troubling: 22 states denied him access; eight states never gave a response – some didn’t even have a contact person for data requests; and another four states said they couldn't respond to his hypothetical. Only 16 states said they would supply the data.

"Yet in all the textbooks, it still says that driver license lists are a source of control groups.  They haven't been updated," he said.

A map of the results published in Walsh's report, titled "Availability of Driver’s License Master Lists for Use in Government-Sponsored Public Health Research," suggests Eastern states are more likely to hand data over to researchers.  In a large swath of the country, from Indiana to Washington and down to Louisiana, the answer was  “no.”  

Moreover, Walsh found only one state even attempted to get its residents' permission to share their data:  Wisconsin. Drivers there have the chance to check  a consent box that's similar to the organ donation box on license applications.  About 70 percent don't do so.

"That creates its own problems, because we see that more educated people  .. .tend not to check, and that skews the lists we can get,"  Walsh said.

The box does not allow consumers to discriminate between sharing their information for research, and sharing it for marketing.

Walsh doesn't spite supporters of the Driver Privacy Protection Act. In fact, he said he was relieved on one level that  the data was hard to get.

"It's definitely good that someone can't just call and get the data," he said.  On the other hand, making health research more difficult is an unintended consequence of the law. "It's hard to decide where the correct balance should be."

There are other ways to get control data for the population at large, Walsh said, but they are both inferior and expensive. 

"It's very helpful to have the most accurate, complete list of everyone in the population," he said.  "It would be nice if we had a perfect list of everyone.  In Sweden, everyone is a national registry. ...The further we get away from that, the harder it is for us to stay competitive."

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Despite several attempts at consumer-friendly financial reform, banks are still unilaterally changing their contracts with consumers and taking their money.

Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp has abruptly raised its annual IRA maintenance fee from $0 to $30 on many customers, leading to a firestorm of complaints on websites frequented by careful savers. The fee increase is particularly painful for consumers who've stocked their accounts with low-interest certificates of deposit — the $30 fee eats significantly into their interest earnings.

On a $2,000 CD placed in an IRA earning 2.5 percent interest – a rate US Bank now offers to savers in Ohio – the $30 fee would eat up more than 60 percent of the $50.58 annual interest earnings. 

The change has consumers spitting bullets, because they have few options other than to pay the fee. USBank charges a fee, and a hefty early withdrawal penalty, to depositors who withdraw money in protest of the change.

"The fee increase leaves me and my wife trapped," said Tom Jackson, 47, of Ohio, in an e-mail to msnbc.com. "And also there's the thought: what's to stop them from raising it again and again and again? Nothing. … When I called the Customer Service line to discuss the problem, the CSR told me they were well within their rights to make these two increases. I then asked why not increase the fee to 50 dollars, or 500, or 5000? Her reply was that if they wished to do so, they could."

Because he and his wife both have their money locked in to 5-year CDs, the real cost to his family will be $300, he said.

USBank’s Teri Charest said in an e-mail to msnbc.com that the fee increase “helps offset the administrative costs on investment accounts.”

“The fees and account terms are very consistent with what’s offered in the industry,” she wrote.

Jackson, like many other consumers, says he was assured there were no fees when he opened the IRA and purchased the conservative investments. Last year, USBank informed some account holders that there would be a $10 fee but that it would be waived for consumers whose balances exceeded $5,000. Recently, the bank told customers that the new fee was $30 and that they'd have to deposit $25,000 to qualify for a fee waiver. For most IRA account holders, that's impossible, however — annual contributions to IRA accounts are capped for most U.S. adults at $5,000 annually.

Zenobia Lal, who lives near Sacramento, Calif., urged her son to open a small IRA with USBank when he was able to scrape together $2,000 after a year of medical school. A 5-year CD earning 4.25 percent interest seemed like a good deal at the time, but now she feels like she gave him bad advice.

"Basically this is their way of taking away our interest," she said. "I strongly suspect they will keep raising the fee every year. … The bank seems to have really hit the jackpot with the idea of charging maintenance fees."

Lal sent several complaint letters to the bank but said the bank "wouldn't budge."

She provided several e-mails that she said were from the bank, including one that arrived from an address called "U.S. Bancorp Executive Response."

"We are sorry to hear of your disappointment with the increase of the annual fee for your IRA account," it read. "Please be assured, decisions such as this are not made without careful consideration for our customers. As with any industry, the banking industry is constantly changing, and it is fair to say the products and services offered today are very different from those offered even in the recent past."

It goes on to cite contract language that allows the bank to make the unilateral change in terms.

"When you opened your IRA with U.S. Bank, you were provided with the IRA Custodial Booklet, acknowledgement of the receipt of which is evidenced by your signature on the IRA Application Form dated March 9, 2009. On page 1, section 8.04 of the Custodial Booklet, it states 'We may change the fees at any time by providing you with notice of such changes,'" it reads. It concludes, "Again, we regret any frustration this matter may have caused for you. We truly value you as a U.S. Bank customer and we appreciate your business."

Jackson isn't buying it.

"I liken this situation to the school bully taking one's lunch money every day. You hand over the money — the lesser pain — or you take a pounding — the greater pain," he said. "You get a choice, absolutely. It just so happens, both choices suck, and the bully knows you'll hand over the lunch money to avoid the major beating."

One intriguing element of USBank's fee increase: It doesn't change the published CD interest rates. So the firm's ranking on various interest CD yield-ranking tools is not affected, even though the real return for IRA investors has taken a hit. This is a common tactic in the world of Gotcha Capitalism, one deftly employed by airlines — web tools that rank air fare prices don't take into account hefty baggage fees, for example, giving an advantage to airlines that charge low ticket prices but high fees.

Banking analyst Greg McBride of BankRate.com said fees for low-balance IRA accounts were “not uncommon” in the investment community.  He suggested frustrated consumers rollover their CDs to a new bank that offers no-fee IRAs.

“You don’t need to liquidate the CD to do a rollover,” he said, which would eliminate the early withdrawal penalty. 

Consumers would still face a “close-out” fee from USBank, however.

To McBridge, the new minimum balance rule is consumers' biggest headache.

"A big hike in minimum balance requirements from one year to the next on an IRA hamstrings investors, no doubt about it. You can’t blame people for being upset," he said.

Both Jackson and Lal say they want USBank to simply let them take their money back without penalty, so they can do business elsewhere. But withdrawal penalties make that impossible. And even if it were possible, there's no way Lal can find a 4.5 percent interest rate today.

"The key thing here is that USBank signed me to a contract where they are apparently allowed to change the terms and I am not permitted to exit when and if they do so," Jackson said. "I feel that I am the victim of a bait and switch. I feel like USBank knows that and is taking extra profit for itself, profit I never agreed to at the outset."

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All their friends do it.  They can probably figure out how to do it behind your back.  And, heck, you probably do it.  So how do you keep your kids off Facebook?

More practically speaking: At what age do you let your kids use Facebook?

This is the first of a new occasional series on this blog called Red Tape Parenting Debates. We'll ask some of the basic parenting questions that arise from the clash of children, technology and money.  We'll provide some research and frame the issues, but chiefly we want msnbc.com readers to share their experiences and help each other with some of the most vexing issues facing parents today. There are no right answers, but there might be a better way.  If you think you have one, share it; if you're unsure about your strategy, read on.

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Ongoing series: Red Tape Parenting Debates
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Facebook and age has been in the news a lot lately. To set the stage, let's clear up U.S. law on the matter. The Child Online Privacy Protection Act does not bar children under 13 from using websites, nor does it prevent companies from working with kids. It bans the collection of personal information contributed by kids under 13 unless the website gets "verifiable parental consent."  The "verifiable" part can vary, but generally involves getting something like a credit card number from a parent as proof of age.

This law, however, hasn't stopped kids from signing up for Facebook — and it might be the most violated law ever. A Pew Internet & American Life Project survey recently found that  46 percent of 12-year-olds use social networks.  A Consumer Reports study found more than 5 million U.S. children under 10 use Facebook.

Facebook does nothing to keep young children off the site; it relies on parents to do that. In a meaningless gesture, it doesn't allow kids who declare themselves under 13 to register.  But simply trying again and declaring a legal age circumvents the token age restriction. 

Recently, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an education conference that elementary school children would benefit from social networks and that his firm would work to remove age restrictions, according to Fortune.

"That will be a fight we take on at some point," he said, though he backed off those comments later.

The clear reality is that young kids use social networks today.  In fact, 17 percent of parents recently said they were OK with pre-teens on Facebook, up from 8 percent one year ago. That study even hinted that some parents help their kids lie to get onto the site.

Whatever the law,  parents, children and Facebook have together made up their own rules about kids and social networks. That's not necessarily a bad thing -- but it is bad if this change is happening without healthy discussion and debate. I hope we can have some on this blog.

There's nothing magical about passing your 13th birthday. It's just as easy to imagine a mature 12-year-old who's ready for Facebook as it is to conjure up a 14-year-old who shouldn't be on the site.  What's important is that parents make a conscious decision about when Facebook use is appropriate, and not simply let the cart pull the horse. 

There are risks to early Facebook use.  Many are obvious: Sexual predators lurk on the Web, and Facebook could be a place where they find targets. Cyberbullying is even a bigger risk, as young children often don't have the emotional and psychological awareness to make good decisions about what they post.  Many parents are also horrified when they stumble on pictures posted by their kids' friends acting out during early stages of puberty.

In a more fundamental way, Facebook and other similar technologies might be rewiring the way kids' brains work, some scientists have warned.  There's no conclusive research, but people like British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield have spoken out warning that "screen relationships" are bad for developing brains.

These dramatic concerns can seem distant and unlikely, however, and most parents will find the Facebook discussion involves more mundane problems, such as whether their kids are glued to social networking sites instead of doing their homework. Are they up late chatting with friends instead of getting enough sleep?  Are they sitting in front of a computer on sunny days when they should be exercising outside?  And perhaps most of all, is Facebook use triggering one of those constant power struggles between kids and parents that the adults are doomed to lose? After all, saying no at home probably means the kid will do it anyway at a friend’s house, or with a smart phone under the covers late at night.

Naturally, Facebook offers many benefits -- otherwise 750 million people wouldn't be hooked on it.  But clearly, there is an age where kids are too young to use it. Congress, albeit awkwardly, has decided that age is 13.  What is your age? And if you let your under-13 kids use Facebook, do you place restrictions on them to moderate the experience? For example, do you manually approve all their new friends?  Do you know their password and check on their account? Do you limit their time using the site? Tell us below.

RED TAPE TIP: There are Facebook alternatives designed for under 12 kids. Most limit interactions, and make strong efforts to verify parental permission. Of course, none offers the free-flowing communication that makes Facebook so attractive. Mashable recently reviewed five such sites.

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Jonathan Woods / msnbc.com

Noam Galai wearing a T-shirt using his likeness. He had to pay $30 for it.

His is the face of revolution in the Middle East and in Latin America. He's on the cover of a book published in Mexico. He's an unforgettable image of anger on T-shirts everywhere.  He's an icon painted by graffiti artists on city walls in Spain and on castle walls in Iran. But really, he's none of those things.

Noam Galai is a photographer who's had his self-portrait stolen and misused all around the world -- a stunning case of global intellectual property theft and identity theft that illustrates how life in the digital age can easily rob people the very essence of their identity.

Galai calls it "The Stolen Scream."

“Even if I remove my original picture now, nothing will change.  The picture is out there now,” he said. “I don’t think they are stealing from me, they are stealing from each other now.”

Five years ago, bored and playing with his camera, the then-21-year-old Israeli art student who'd just arrived in New York City took a series of self-portraits and posted them on Flickr. Most of the images involved Galai hamming it up with an exaggerated primal scream. 

 "I had been thinking about trying it for a while, but the whole session took maybe three minutes," he said.

The concept worked, as Galai generated an image that unmistakably evokes human frustration that has boiled over.  Even his parents, when they saw the picture, called to see if he was feeling alright.

"They said, 'Why is our son taking a picture like that?'  So I knew the images made people flinch. They felt something," he said.

In fact, they worked too well. Soon after, the image drove someone to copy it and steal it.  Then another and another.  Galai doesn't really know how it started, but he remembers the day several years ago when a friend congratulated him for selling the image on T-shirts after seeing someone wearing one featuring "The Scream" on the New York City subway.

"I said, 'what are you talking about? I'm not selling shirts,' " Galai recalls.

That set the young photographer on a hunting expedition that eventually revealed that his picture -- and his face -- were being used all over the world for purposes both mundane and profound. He found buttons with his face being sold at tourist traps in the U.S.;  he found a rock band album cover using it. He found many T-shirts in New York City stores – and was forced to pay up to $30 apiece to get his hands on them. An author in Mexico used the picture on his cover, crediting a different artist. He found graffiti in Iran using his face to inspire revolution.

The latter didn’t bother him.

"If people there want to get rid of the government, and giving them my face helps, why not?" he said. 

Galai has found examples of his face used in other anti-government movements -- posters in Honduras, and banners in Spain, for example. And he's been told the image has been used in Syria and Egypt as well, though has yet to receive images confirming that.

Galai recently started a blog to chronicle all the uses he's found, and Web users around the globe are sending him new examples. An artist in the Netherlands, for instance, recently mailed him a painting bearing his likeness that she had unknowingly created and used in an exhibition.

The strangest story he’s yet heard from blog readers came from a Romanian traveler who saw Galai’s story and remembered a photograph he’d taken a year earlier in Cantavieja, Spain.  Galai got the address from the Romanian, typed it into Google Street View, and browsed to a picture of himself on a wall there. 

Jonathan Woods / msnbc.com

Some examples of Galai's image being used – Note: National Geographic licensed the image from him for Glimpse.

For all this trouble, Galai has been paid precisely once for use of the image, by National Geographic, which used his image on its Glimpse magazine. He has mixed feelings about that.

"There are two ways people use the image," Galai said. "One is when people use my picture to make money. I hate when people do that without asking. But when it's used for movements and art, I feel like maybe I am helping them, and I don’t really mind."

There is plenty of irony in some of the uses – and not just because the image has been used in Iran, and Galai took it only a few weeks after leaving the Israeli army, where he drove tanks. Almost always, the image is used by people who are angry, frustrated and on the verge of taking a radical step. He was none of those things when the picture was taken.

"I'm exactly the opposite,” he said. “I'm calm and happy most of the time, and rarely angry. ... I got the idea when I was yawning in front of a mirror."

Jonathan D. Woods / msnbc.com

Galai, normally a shy, friendly photographer, looks nothing like the revolutionary he’s been turned into.

Any similarities with Edvard Munch's famous "The Scream" painting also are purely coincidental, he said.   "I did it just for fun.  I was just bored. I usually take the best pictures when I am bored."

The massive and persistent intellectual property theft has gotten the attention of some photography organizations. A group called Fstoppers recently published a video chronicling Galai's adventure in identity and copyright theft.

In a blog post about the video, Fstoppers founders Patrick Hall and Lee Morris raised the possibility that Galai may have spared himself all these troubles by watermarking the image before he posted it –but then concluded that may not have been the best thing in the end.

“For a photographer, the biggest thing you are trying to do is get your work in front of people and get a name for yourself. For a lot of people, the first bit of recognition comes out of nowhere. Then the idea is to catch that wave and use it to propel your work,” said Hall in an interview with msnbc.com. “The way I look at it, Noam has had maybe 100,000 people see the video. It’s caused controversy, but it’s brought a lot of attention to his work. … If (the original images) were licensed properly, maybe no one would have taken an interest in them. “

Galai, who now works as a photographer and advertising artist for AOL in New York, says the Stolen Scream has been more a blessing than a curse for him. It has brought him attention that has won him some free-lance work.  He also has begun selling his own T-shirts and other souvenirs on his website.

"If someone is making money off my image, it might as well be me," he said. "But it’s still weird to see my face in so many places and so many different uses. I don't think I'll ever get used to it.”

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