How quickly we tire. In the beginning we had color coded terror alert levels, no doubt designed to tell people quickly what the threat and safety levels were in the country. Headlines read “threat level at Orange” or “Washington lowers threat level to Yellow”. Then the color wasn’t enough. Deep Orange crept in. Now even the color isn’t enough for the headlines. “High” has replaced Orange. But what is “high”? Isn’t Yellow high compared to Blue? And certainly Red is higher than Orange. The whole point of the colors was to remove ambiguity from the threat levels. But it has returned. Personally I think it’s because people are just plain bored with it all. Nothing has happened here since 9/11. Oh sure we’re told that many attempts have been thwarted but we haven’t been given any proof and even a thwarted attempt is hallow compared to actual explosions and death plastered on every TV station for 24 hours. And that’s the problem I see. On one hand 9/11 is a hard act to follow for the Bin Laden crew. It had surprise, spectacular visuals, ground breaking destruction and news coverage. A restaurant bombing or a water poising will pale in comparison. Hardly hold anyone’s interest for very long. And these overseas bombings? Do they pay attention? Americans simply don’t care about things overseas. Hell we don’t care about things in Canada or Mexico, and a lot of the time we don’t care about what’s going on IN our own country. Even if it’s our people, it’s hardly note worthy. Now the other hand; people are only getting annoyed by the heightened security levels with now matching destruction. Like the boy who cried wolf, people are starting to loose sight of what the whole thing is about. Police are annoyed and disgruntled because they have to work 12 hour shifts. Travels are, justifiably, annoyed at the increased time waste at airports. And all this annoyance undermines the importance of real vigilance. And it seems quite easy by comparison for terror units to create this state of annoyance with security in us. Just get on the “secure” channels and babble a lot about possible attacks and soon the powers that be are all worked up and we’re at another increase in our threat level, who cares what color it is. They don’t have to DO anything anymore to create an effect over here. How long can we sustain this siege mentality without seeing something blow up? Maybe a little destruction is good for morale?