Excerpts from the Boston Globe of March 19, 2002:

Color Coordinator

IT'S NOT EASY being yellow. It's not even clear what yellow means, although Tom Ridge, the director of homeland security, introduced his new five-color terrorist alert system last week to make readiness easier to understand.

He wanted to eliminate the confusion - and occasional panic - that government warnings have caused in Boston and around the country since Sept. 11.

But his security spectrum, running from ''low condition green'' on up through ''guarded'' blue, ''elevated'' yellow, ''high'' orange, and ''severe'' red, does little to make a person feel informed or ready.

Linear scales rarely do, for while the extremes are fairly obvious, the murky middle fogs the mind.

When an evaluation form asks for the checking of a box somewhere between the poles of ''substandard'' and ''superior,'' a person can spend way too long trying to figure out the difference between ''good,'' ''very good,'' and ''excellent.''

When a doctor wants to know if the pain is ''minimal,'' ''moderate,'' ''dull,'' ''sharp,'' or ''severe,'' the patient hesitates, often coming up with a ''sort of, but not quite.''

So it is with our current ''elevated condition yellow,'' which Ridge says means we're living with a ''significant risk of terrorist attacks.''

The citizen ponders the significance of the word ''significant'' and wonders how it differs from the ''high'' of code orange and the ''general risk'' of code blue.

Each color comes with directives that seem equally muddy, telling federal employees around the nation to do such things as provide the public with ''necessary information'' under blue and to increase surveillance of ''critical locations'' under yellow.

But what information is ''necessary'' and what locations are ''critical''? Even a bureaucrat might have trouble deciphering the code yellow stipulation to assess ''further refinement of protective measures within the context of the current threat information.''

How much simpler life would be if we could have a security alert equivalent of ''on'' and ''off.'' But very little is simple anymore, and for decades there has been no ''off,'' even though we acted as though there were.
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Remember the good-ol 50's?
"DUCK-n-COVER", a.k.a, "Bend over, grab your ankles, and kiss your ass goodby."

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