Paul Krugman in the NY Times this morning wrote something about Reclaiming America's Soul.  In his discourse he listed a number of problems we are facing and described them as the 'crisis' of this and the 'crisis' of that.  It seemed plain to me that all the problems could be described as an unacceptable group of CRISES, a plural thing that multiplies the force of a whole group of individual crises that we face as we enter the post-Bush world.

Listing them individually you get a picture that there is nothing really safe and secure about our lives even though we live in the most powerful nation in the world.  You could add up all our pluses and find that we are in pretty good shape despite there being quite a number of crises that when thought of as a plural of a crisis, they take on a really frightening aspect.  I don't think I am very good in a crisis situation these days.  Once I could take on the world.  Now, I stop to think about it and before you know it, the crisis has passed.

Dealing with a whole bunch of crises can make you revert to childhood and insert your thumb in your mouth and look dumbly up at the world.  It is simply too much, too tremendous to try to deal with it - for it isn't a singular thing it is a plural thing - a whole bunch of crises that are really unthinkable even though they are right out there in front of you waiting to be handled.  Who does the handling?  Well, there are you and me and the failures that were put in place to take care of the aftermath of hurricanes, floods and blizzards and such.  Nature's usual suspects.

Then, there are the man-made crises that are not singular at all.  When one comes up it drags others down.  Like Banks, mortgages, house building and deciding which bill NOT to pay this month and let it go and see what happens.

Mr. Krugman cites "immense" challenges such as the economy, health care and the environment.  He suggests that these were caused by a failure of the previous government - not government in the abstract but specifically the Bush crowd who left office and crises (plural) behind for others to have to grapple with.

Taken in the aggregate, the crises which face not only this country but they involve the rest of the world that takes its cues from us.  We have not run our country by rules that served us in the past like honesty and public service.  We have run it by thinking only about the power that devolves on an elected crew that stole its power in the first place.  The rest of us stood by and let that happen.

So, there we are with thumbs in our mouths waiting for the planet sized tsunami to inundate us. Let's crouch in a corner with a blanket over our heads.