Have a 'green' tomorrow

KENNETT, Mo. -- Psychiatrists, as is their wont, have a tendency to view society from the viewpoint of whatever happens to be, if you will pardon the term, the current mental fixation of the month.

Since Sept. 11, America's shrinks have been focusing on the most recent manifestations exhibited by a nervous nation while wondering aloud how each affects our behavior as the U.S. tried to remain calm and collected, even when we're invading an unfriendly nation like Iraq. Or when the White House schedules another presidential address to the nation, this one about Iraq, Syria, North Korea or the national headquarters of the Democratic Party.

As might be expected, our attempt to remain as calm as humanly possible hasn't been helped by Washington bureaucrats, particularly those from the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. Someone connected with that agency, and I'm certainly not pointing my finger at Secretary Tom Ridge, has devised what is being called an "Anxiety Meter," a multicolored graphic to inform us of the degree of terrorist danger we're facing at any moment of the day or night. When he proudly unveiled his colorful chart, the former Pennsylvania governor boasted his terrorism experts would provide us with a color-coded guide about how to view foreign threats anywhere at any moment of the day or night.

I recall trying to remember the five colors that were chosen and their ranking on the anxiety meter but became confused when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld assured us he was getting closer and closer to terrorist weapons of mass destruction and was not the least bit red-faced about the lack of success thus far. "Am I blue?" Rumsfeld asked rhetorically, "Not in the least, and our critics make all of us connected with the amazing success of the Iraq invasion understand how yellow they are when it comes time to protect our great democratic freedoms, including the right of free speed."

Trying to do my bit as an open-minded citizen I did the best I could to remember on an immediate terrorist notice what each of Secretary Ridge's colors meant as well as their proper order in this new disorderly age of anxiety -- after repeating numerous times that red was the worst color we could receive some morning on the early news and where yellow ranked in terms of orange or blue in the great scheme of things. The only anxiety color I could retain for more than 60 seconds was green, which is a favorite shade and so became the most easily remembered. Trying to be helpful even while missing the mark, Terrorist Czar Ridge assigned a descriptive word to each of the five anxiety classifications. As might be expected, the highest anxiety classification -- red --has been assigned the description of "Severe." The one just a step lower is orange and it has been labeled "High." Right in the middle of the colors is bright yellow, but it's been designated as "Elevated." Fourth ranking blue has been labeled "Guarded" and last but not least, the anxiety color green bears a reassuring "Low" designation.

Let me warn you, trying to recall the anxiety colors, their ranking and their designations can be extremely frustrating, which is where the psychiatrists (See Paragraph 1) come in. Several have voiced concern about "added stress" created by the coding system, which somehow seems a relatively small problem when a terrorist-captured jet airliner is headed for your office building. Most of us won't need any color flash from Ridge's department to react to such an emergency.

No one seems confident that turning America's terrorist protection over to a huge, brand new federal agency is the best path to take, although I think a warning to Washington might be in order at this point: Don't give the job to the U.S. Census Bureau, which just announced, somewhat reluctantly, that it has overcounted the nation's population by 1.3 million citizens, after originally stating it had undercounted the population by 3 million.

If Washington can't accurately count citizens on the ground, how can we expect an accurate count of screaming Muslims getting ready to blow us all to smithereens? No wonder your friendly neighborhood psychiatrist is happily rubbing his hands in anticipation of hundreds of new anxiety-ridden patients who are horribly color-blind?

Jack Stapleton is the editor of Missouri News & Editorial Service.