It's code orange! What do I do?

Somewhere along the line American society pulled something of a cultural M.C. Escher. You've probably seen that famous print called "Sky and Water." Black birds at the top of the illustration squeeze closer together until the white spaces between them become fish at the bottom of the print. Neat trick. Are they birds or fish? Did the fish become the birds or did the birds transform into fish? Like all Escher prints, it only works on paper. It only works in make-believe.

Our culture is kind of like that, now. In the old days, when television was new, the programs drew from life and then exaggerated upon it for effect. Now that television has become a part of our reality -- maybe the most common part -- the whole process seems to have turned around. We watch exaggerated television shows, assume that's how real people are supposed to act, and we try to fashion our lives that way. It only works on paper or in make-believe. In real life, we just look like bad actors being melodramatic. We expect police to act like the guys on our favorite cop shows.

A great example is the terror alert system dreamed up by Tom Ridge. It's a color coded thing that's supposed to tell us how scared to be at any given time. You know, it starts at green if the terror level is low and goes all the way up to red if anthrax spores are halfway up your nose. I think it was kind of modeled after the alert system aboard the Starship Enterprise and other space vehicles capable of traveling faster than the speed of light. Capt. Kirk says, "Go to Red Alert," and all kinds of cool things happen. Shields automatically go up, weapons are armed, a very annoying alarm starts going off and the lights in the ship begin flashing red -- much to the dismay of epileptic crew members. All that stuff happens with the utterance of just four words. Nice. Efficient.

Right now, the United states has gone code orange. That's "high" alert. It's the one before red. Unfortunately, when somebody in charge said, "Go to Code Orange," nothing much really happened. No shields went up. No devastating, phaser-type weapons were armed. We didn't even get the annoying alarm and the flashing lights. In fact, as far as anyone can tell, code orange looks a lot like code green. Code red would also probably look a bit like code green except that something would probably be on fire and a government official would probably be on television saying, "We tried to warn you!"

The truth is, we all know the alert system doesn't make us safer. I tried to figure out what I was supposed to do when we went orange. I looked out my window expecting to see little civil defense guys in shiny helmets, Dubya fanny packs and high-powered rifles double-timing down my street. Nope. Just a school bus.

Was I supposed to do something different? The morning news anchor man explained code orange. Americans were supposed to be more careful. We were supposed to be especially vigilant and report anything suspicious to the "proper authorities." What exactly was I supposed to be more careful about? Should I check the sky for missiles or the air for toxins or viruses before going to pick up my pizza? Should I check my car for bombs or my stairs for booby traps? I'm not too vigilant, to begin with. If my neighbors had an operational death ray on their roof, I'd be the last to know. And if I did figure it out, I wouldn't have the foggiest idea who the proper authority was. Who do you call about a death ray -- the FBI, the CIA, the Imperial High Council? Be honest. When we went code orange did you get more careful and vigilant? Did you break out your Proper Authorities Wiring Diagram?

No you didn't. You got up, took a shower and went to work like everybody else. You probably took a moment to hope like all get-out that no lunatics would come around and blow up something in your town that day -- especially something where you or someone you love happened to be at the moment. What we've really learned from this is that terrorists can make headlines by sending a bunch of e-mails out with scary words in them. If we ever really do have to go code red, and I hope we don't, we'll also learn that the alert system doesn't make us more safe … it only makes us more nervous.

Frank Ameduri doesn't think terrorists are afraid of orange.