because every aspect of our lives has been in crisis for decades, we now have to move to other ways to express the non-stop ubiquitous disaster. thus the coinage extreme crisis. this would appear to be redundant, but is not. the healthcare crisis is acute and must be addressed immediately. however, we have been muddling along with more or less the same system since 1813. there has never been a moment in my 52 years in which education has not been in crisis. all of these gigantic mini-crises of course take place within the greatest crisis our species has ever faced: global warming, which is our biggest national security crisis.

so it's well past time we started tacking intensifiers on 'crisis,' which now refers to the normal or run-of-the-mill state of affairs in any given sphere. 'crisis,' in other words, has become synonymous with 'reality,' and just as something could be really real, a crisis could be critical. 'crisis' has lost its ability to mobilize, which was all it was ever actually used for anyway. well, i think now you're gonna need actual clubs and body armor to motivate anyone to do anything. during the next presidential campaign, for example, i think we should refer to american education as a "world-annihilating conflagration" or an "apocalypse."

however, i am already kind of bored by world-annihilating conflagrations and apocalypses, which are now available wholesale at six cents per thousand. the concept of the crisis is in crisis, in other words. so, if elected, i will try to remediate the extreme crisis crisis through understatement or perhaps a couple of centuries of absolute silence.