Crisis

The Community Services Council will be searching for at least $10,000 in donations of cash and services to start the Short-Term Crisis Loan Fund.The fund received $10,000 in August from an anonymous foundation. But that gift requires that the council match it with donations from the community, said Commissioner Jeff Griffith.Griffith suggested members of the council seek in-kind donations for day care, auto repairs, food and other goods or services people need in emergencies.The fund is designed for working people who find themselves in a short-term financial crisis but qualify for no public assistance.

They speak frankly about racism, they sing racy songs, they're addicted to Internet porn and they're puppets. But the colorful characters of the Broadway musical Avenue Q also deal with a topical subject that is near and dear to today's younger generation: the so-called "quarterlife crisis." The tale of Princeton, the hope-filled hero who moves into an outer borough of New York City when avenues A through P don't have much in the way of cheap real estate, comes this week to the Hippodrome Theatre and touches on such universal issues as failures in the job market, relationship troubles, insecurities about the future, yearnings for the good ol' days of the campus quad and the insecurities that come with adult-level responsibility.

After 18 months in temporary quarters, staff and residents of the Grassroots Crisis Intervention Center are set to move into their new $5 million building that replaces the nonprofit's cramped former quarters on the same site. "It's a very busy time, and we'll all be quite relieved when we're into the building," said Andrea Ingram, Grassroots' director. She's been rushing from one crucial last-minute inspection to another, while coordinating delivery of furniture and planning for a celebratory ribbon-cutting today.

Washington. -- Government, like other situation comedies, is in summer reruns.On April 30, 1970, President Nixon, addressing the nation about the U.S. ''incursion'' into Cambodia, warned that the United States dare not be perceived as ''a pitiful, helpless giant.''Recently, as Congress writhed in its crime bill agonies, Speaker Tom Foley exclaimed, ''Let us not be a helpless giant!''The federal government is an increasingly helpless giant. This is a good thing, given that the alternative is for the giant to get its way, which would not be good for a free society.

Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller says state legislators are so distressed over the thought of a special General Assembly session to cure Maryland's latest deficit woes that "if we even considered the prospect, we'd have a revolt." That's the kind of no-leadership attitude which has placed lawmakers in such low public regard these days.Less than four weeks into the new fiscal year, Maryland is already somewhere between $170 million and $250 million in the red. Some experts are predicting a shortfall of $400 million by next spring.

MARYLAND'S LOW-INCOME housing market is headed into a crisis: Nearly half of 35,000 low-income units statewide may be lost in the next four years because their owners are thinking of quitting subsidy programs. Owners can make more money by charging market-rate rents, which are soaring, or by selling the buildings. The result can be seen in Baltimore City: 43 percent of tenants with Section 8 vouchers cannot find qualifying apartments or landlords willing to accept them. In coming months, the situation is only likely to grow worse as the pool of low- income housing shrinks.

IT IS unfair to say that the Clinton administration is staffed by people who have never actually made anything. They have manufactured a crisis -- which they now propose to "solve."I refer to the administration's plans on health care. Declaring the situation to be a crisis doesn't make it so. Are there discrete problems and inefficiencies which could profit from careful reform? Absolutely. But to say that a system which provides the highest quality care in the world (bar none) and which three-quarters of the American people declare to be satisfactory (far more than find Mr. Clinton agreeable at the moment)

Speaker Newt Gingrich has disclosed to this newspaper that House Republicans will insist that Mexico adopt "pro-growth, pro-jobs, pro-investment" economic policies as a condition for the proposed $40 billion United States bailout of Mexico's plunging financial sector. He also has told us that Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan "absolutely" have endorsed this approach.If this is the case, it would represent a sharp reversal of traditional U.S. policies in providing financial support to troubled nations beyond our borders.

R ichard Sher, who announced his departure from WJZ this week after 33 years of reporting and anchoring, says he isn't completely done with the news biz. I'm not sure he was ever completely in it. Among the "many accomplishments" listed on his new Web site, www.richardsher.tv: "talking a suicidal man off a ledge at the University of Maryland Medical Center; negotiating for more than 10 hours with a hostage taker, eventually arranging for the safe release of the man's hostage; and receiving the first civilian lifesaving award ever presented by the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, for helping a man suffering from a heart attack find his way to an emergency room, all the while giving the man nitro glycerin and driving the man's car."

New York. -- Twenty years ago, ringing the bell at a friend's apartment in a brownstone on West 78th Street in Manhattan, I saw a guy urinating against the wall of a house across the street. I was shocked and, upstairs, I said: ''This is incredible. This is the way the world ends.''''No,'' said another reporter from the New York Times, Steve Weisman. ''This is the way the world began.''Those were the good old days. New Yorkers don't notice such things anymore, unless somebody wants to do it on your leg -- which is quite possible if you don't move quickly.