Terror Threat Levels = Lunacy

I may be a neurologist, but I do know lunacy when I see it. This is not going to be a political statement in favor of, or against the war on terror. What I want to show is why the terror threat system doesn't work, on a basic logical, psychological level.

Here is a rundown on this from our government, if you want details; technically, it's called the "Homeland Security Advisory System." Briefly, we have five levels: Low (Green), Guarded (Blue), Elevated (Yellow), High (Orange), and Severe (Red). So what are the problems?

First of all, we cannot really imagine, for social psychological reasons, that we will ever see Low (Green) or Severe (Red) being used. The only exception might be imagined retrospectively on Sept. 11, 2001, but would we have needed a Red threat level to help us out in some way? And certainly we have to believe that we'll never see Low again -- I guess at that point we can send the TSA home and run willy-nilly around airports again, with pocket knives, lighters, and sundry potential weapons hanging out of our pockets.

So we're left with 3 "usable" threat levels. At the moment of this writing we're in Yellow, and we've seen a lot of Orange. Since there is a whole Department of the government that has this level system as one of its centerpieces, it can't just leave the level the same all the time, or people will get complacent. They also can't be changing it every few hours, or people will get complacent about that.

As I stated above, so far we're down to 3 choices, but we're not too likely to see Guarded (Blue) being used -- it looks too cool, too calm. How can you have Blue when people are blowing themselves up around the world on a regular basis? When do we perceive that's going to stop?

So now, we're down to only two practical choices -- and that's about all we've seen the whole time we've had this system. And even then, do we see anybody doing anything different at an Orange level compared to Yellow? I mean anybody: businesses, the postman, government offices, the military?

So maybe it's time to donate the Homeland Security Advisory System to the Smithsonian.