Word of the Decade: Crisis

I suppose that it began on September 11th, 2001 or in the days and weeks following. Since the beginning of the current decade, Americans have been bombarded by the news media with proclamations of doom and warnings that they should be living in fear. The media has made us more aware than ever before about disasters and crises at home and abroad.

With this new level of awareness has come an overflow of information. My question is, does the average American possess the ability to filter out the garbage (i.e. what Obama's pastor said or what Saddam did 20 years ago) and focus in on matters of substantive policy that will ultimately affect their lives? Or, are Americans overwhelmed by too much useless information that was once reserved for the supermarket tabloids, which causes them to be unable to focus on important substantive policy issues? Some examples of questions that should have been asked include "Does Obama's pastor have any affect on his ability make sound policy decisions?" or "Does Saddam present any clear and present danger to our nation, to the point that we should risk the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans and Iraqis?"

Reasonable minds may disagree on how exactly we arrived to this point of unprecedented availability of information but the general answer is that the news media has become ubiquitous; we can't escape it. Witness the rise of the cellphone, the crack-berry, and the iPhone. I think the fact that so many people are inundated and overloaded with information has caused the American people to be unable to discriminate between a true policy issue and an issue designed to cause that person to make an irrational decision based on limited information and emotional reactions.

Now that I answered my first question I can ask my real question:
How can we know that we are facing severe crisis and when should we call for action?

How worried should we be about the following?

(a) "Homeland Security"
- I have quasi-fringe feelings on this matter that I will keep to myself at this time. Suffice it to say that it has occurred to me that Republican fear-mongering may pose more long-term dangers than terrorism itself.

(b) "The Subprime Mortgage Crisis"
- Clearly if you took a 5 year ARM at 4.5% which will soon be resetting to 9%, you're in trouble. In fact, you're probably more likely to walk away from your home than you are to try to continue making payments, especially if you probably shouldn't have been approved in the first place and you stand little to no chance of getting a refinanced loan on similarly favorable lending terms.

(c) "The Next Natural Resources Crisis"
Notwithstanding the huge spikes in Food, Metal, and Oil and Gas prices, How did we not see this one coming? The inspiration for this post is in an American Prospect article about the world's next crisis: shortages of potable fresh drinking water. Imagine that, privatization of water utilities leads to public trading of futures contracts for drinking water. I'm not sure that is exactly what Ronald Reagan had in mind when he set out on his conquest to shrink the size of government. That is privatization gone waaaaaay too far.

I'm concerned. Very concerned. And quite frankly I don't need the news media to tell me that I should be concerned. What I need is a leader who cares that flocks of canaries are dying in the proverbial coal mines. Bush is definitely NOT that leader. The question is, can Obama, or anyone else, meet the Herculean challenges that we are currently facing?