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Bruce Schneier has written an article about Living in a Code Yellow World:
In 1989, handgun expert Jeff Cooper invented something called the Color Code to describe what he called the "combat mind-set." Here is his summary:
In White you are unprepared and unready to take lethal action. If you are attacked in White you will probably die unless your adversary is totally inept.
In Yellow you bring yourself to the understanding that your life may be in danger and that you may have to do something about it.
In Orange you have determined upon a specific adversary and are prepared to take action which may result in his death, but you are not in a lethal mode.
In Red you are in a lethal mode and will shoot if circumstances warrant.
Cooper talked about remaining in Code Yellow over time, but he didn't write about its psychological toll. It's significant. Our brains can't be on that alert level constantly. We need downtime. We need to relax. This is why we have friends around whom we can let our guard down and homes where we can close our doors to outsiders. We only want to visit Yellowland occasionally.
Since 9/11, the US has increasingly become Yellowland, a place where we assume danger is imminent. It's damaging to us individually and as a society.
He continues:
Those of us fortunate enough to live in a Code White society are much better served acting like we do. This is something we need to learn at all levels, from our personal interactions to our national policy. Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, many of our counterterrorism policies have helped convince people they're not safe, and that they need to be in a constant state of readiness. We need our leaders to lead us out of Yellowland, not to perpetuate it.
What are my fellow Soylentil's views on Bruce Schneier's assessment?
(Score: 2) by morgauxo on Tuesday September 29 2015, @03:45PM
It's not that dangerous here. There certainly neighborhoods where you should be in yellow or even orange but that is true all over the world.
The truth.. regardless if people want to admit it or not is that life in a civilized society is pretty boring. You are born, you go to school, you work, you die. 99% of our lives take pretty much the same arc. We all want to think our lives are more exciting than that. Nobody wants their lives to be endangered yet there is yearning for something different, something more exciting. It's probably an evolutionary holdover from when we had to worry about getting eaten by a predator or something like that.
So... naturally.. drama sells. Most of us love a good action movie. But it isn't real. So.. when there is some killing on the nightly news.. far too many of us just lap that shit up. And then.. totally ignoring the fact that we are a country spanning somewhere around 1/2 of a fairly large continent and containing something like 380 million with only a handfull of really bad incidents people internalize all that drama. Someone flew some planes into a couple of buildings. That's a couple of planes out of how many thousands? A couple of buildings out of how many millions? How likely is your building to be among them? But OMG! It's certainly going to happen to me! Somebody shot up a school. It's happened to a few schools out of how many? But OMG! My own kid is in danger now!
No.. we are not in danger. You can live your life in the 'white' and be 99.9% sure it will be a long and happy life. It is only the love of drama and sheer stupidity regarding statistics that make people stress out in the US. In other words it is human nature. Don't be smug world. All you would need to export that BS somewhere else is the right kind of reporting and a little bit of time.