Level Forty-Two

 Anybody here remember the Terror Alert Scale? Keep your hands up while I count.

Okay. About seventeen. That seems about right. Back when we were at war with Terror, our government gave us a simple and colorful way to know how frightened we should be. Starting with the lowest level of fear, we had green, then blue for just a little bit scared. Which sort of makes sense in that "green means go" kind of way, but blue seems so much more chill. Yellow was next, which was deemed "significant risk" and that's pretty much how we all lived for the first ten years of this new century. What comes after "significant?" How about an orange high, followed by red, which splits the hair once again to be called "severe." I might have suggested adding brown to the spectrum, for all the inappropriate reasons you might imagine. 

For the past few years, the folks at Homeland Security have been sending out regular advisories about when we should be afraid, and when we should be more afraid. They aren't bothering with the Rainbow of Terror so much anymore, having consigned that to the dustbin of history in late 2010. If we really want to be in the know about or level of fright, we are asked to read these notes from NTAS, the National Terrorism Advisory System. The most recent of these reminds us all to be on alert for big groups of DVEs. Domestic Violent Extremists. "The ongoing global pandemic continues to exacerbate these threats, in part due to perceived government overreach in implementation of public health safety measures."

Yes, everything old is new again, as we make our way to our second full year of COVID and all the fear associated with it. Sure, we can choose to worry about foreign agents disrupting the two week lull while we change our calendars and try to figure out how to return things from Amazon, or we could just ago ahead and start being afraid of the Greek Alphabet. Omicron is the fifteenth letter, which suggests that we may have slept through all those other letters since Delta. Or perhaps there were some variants that were less threatening than others, with side effects like making it sound like you inhaled helium for a a few days. That would be the cute variant, maybe Iota, since it sounds funny. 

Or maybe we have finally reached a place in history when we can't be terrified anymore. The bar has been moved so many times that we just don't bother trying to clear it anymore. Life is just a constant flurry of dread, and trying to make gradients within it is time that could be spent panicking. 

Which suggests we just passed brown.