The US Government has had the Homeland Security Advisory System in place for the past year or so. This is the color-coded alert system that’s supposed to tell us how much danger we’re in of experiencing a big terrorist strike. The Advisory System has five levels, and so far the indicator has bounced around between the second and third highest levels (i.e., orange, aka “high”, and yellow, aka “elevated”). The Department of Homeland (In)Security has not yet dropped the alert status level down to blue (“guarded”), the second lowest level, not even for a few days. It looks as if we’re stuck with yellow (“elevated”) and orange (“high”) for the foreseeable future.

This all makes me wonder, what would it take in order for DHS to drop the terror alert status down to green, “low”? We’d really need a humongous “summer of love” for that one, wouldn’t we. We’d have to bring back the late 60’s and take them world-wide. Perhaps we’d have to fulfill the idealistic lyrics of John Lennon’s 1971 song “Imagine”. No heaven, no hell, no countries, no religion, no possessions, everything being shared. Hmm, well, don’t hold your breath on that one.

I myself would settle for a code-blue world where there was still a heaven, still a hell, still countries, still religion, still possessions, and not quite everything being shared, but at least enough to make the poorest nations and the most desperate people believe that it’s better to educate their children and cooperate with Uncle Sam’s capitalist posse rather than to train for suicide bombings. Yea, that in itself would be a huge stretch of the imagination. But hey, ya gotta keep dreaming, ya gotta keep hope alive. Hopefully, somebody reading this (maybe you college students) will live to see “code blue” someday. “And the world will live as one”. Almost, anyway.