ALERT SYSTEM GIVES TERRORISTS WHAT THEY WANT (2-2003)

Let’s see; what is the terrorist warning level today? Is it 
still orange or have we moved back down into the more 
secure yellow alert?

And why do we use colors anyway? Some people, myself 
included, are partially colorblind, so unless someone tells 
us, we wouldn’t know orange from red. 

The terror alert scheme is serious business, as is 
terrorism itself. But there has to be a better way. The 
“color alerts” have been lampooned by more than one late-
night talk show host. 

Saturday Night Live made fun of it in one of their sketches 
last year by showing each color as a different name of the 
same shade: off white, cream, oyster shell, etc. And Jay 
Leno quipped, “Why do we use colors when the news announcer 
always has to tell us what the color means anyway?” 

If we must use terrorist alert levels, why not use numbers. 
The air defense command uses defense condition terminology 
such as Defcon 1 or Defcon 4. That might still be 
confusing, though. I’m not sure which one is worse, 1 or 4.

Practically speaking, however, I believe the terrorist 
alert system is flawed to the point of being virtually 
useless. How much more alert should one be during a 
condition orange than a condition yellow? And if we ever 
have a condition green, does that mean there is no chance 
of a terrorist attack? And if that’s what green means, then 
a condition green is purely hypothetical.

Devising such an alert system simply means that the 
terrorists have actually already won, at least on one 
level. Think about it – what does the word terrorism mean?

It means to provoke terror, or extreme fear, in someone or 
some group of people. Our government, when it issues a code 
orange alert and then advises everyone to go out and buy 
rolls of duct tape and plastic wrap and to stock up on 
canned goods and water to last at least three days, is 
causing fear and even panic in its own citizens.

If anyone remembers the early episodes of the old TV show 
“Happy Days,” you know that the character Fonzy was feared. 
He had a tough guy reputation and nobody wanted to mess 
with him. Yet Fonzy never got into a fight on the show. His 
fear stemmed from an earlier episode where he stood up for 
himself when confronted by hoods. But after that victory, 
he never had to fight again.

Isn’t it the same with terrorism? If terrorists are leading 
our government to issue warnings, and if these warnings 
provoke fear in the people of this country, then the 
terrorists have done their jobs well. They have succeeded 
in terrorizing us, even without setting off so much as a 
firecracker.

Obviously, that’s not to say a terrorist group won’t 
eventually bomb us or crash another plane into one of our 
buildings again. But it does mean that they don’t have to 
do it very often in order to scare the living daylights out 
of us.

Our best defense against terrorism is simply not to give in 
to fear. It is rather pointless to be ultra-prepared for 
something that has a very, very small chance of happening. 
Even if terrorists do strike again, what are the odds that 
they will strike me or you? We would have a better chance 
of winning the lottery three weeks in a row.

I’m not saying we should not be vigilante. That’s only 
prudent. But we should basically just get on with our lives 
as though we had never been attacked in the first place. 
And the government should immediately dismantle its color-
coded terrorist warnings in favor of a much simpler “high-
alert/normal-alert” status.

A normal alert is the status quo. Be normally alert every 
day. And a high alert should only be issued for specific 
regions of the country in which it has been determined that 
terrorist activity is imminent.

Otherwise, we are giving the terrorists exactly what they 
want. They want us to fear them. And our fear is what they 
have.