Alert overload Remember when amber was just a stone? BY KRIS FRIESWICK

DRIVING DOWN the Mass Pike the other day, my boss passed one of those big scrolling computer signs that have sprung up on the roadway lately to give motorists important messages like DELAYS AHEAD and GO SOX. That day, the sign read ATTENTION: AMBER ALERT IN EFFECT. She felt a mild panic. "Amber?" she thought. "Is that higher than an orange alert? Or red?"

It’s official. We have reached Alert Overload. Terror alerts warn of possible attacks by an unknown assailant at an unknown location at an unknown time, then urge us to go about our daily lives while remaining "vigilant." Amber Alerts — which give notice that a kidnapped child is in danger — remind us that the biggest, most imminent threat to our family’s safety is right next door. Air-quality alerts leave us with little option but to hold our breath. We’ve hit some kind of a wall. The human mind was built to process only so many simultaneous threats, whether real, imagined, or manufactured. Some, like my boss, are having a hard time telling them apart. And I’m sure she’s not alone.

I look back fondly on the days when the biggest intrusions on our peaceful lives were "warnings." Remember when warnings meant something? You saw one, and you stopped, you looked both ways, you closed before striking, you didn’t climb the electrical tower. Then they started popping up on everything: cigarettes (warning: this product will kill you if you so much as look at it), alcohol (warning: product may convince you you’re stronger than you are), bottled water (warning: do not inhale), even oven mitts (warning: this product offers no heat protection for the hand it is not on). Today, everyone knows that warnings are there to keep the Darwin Award crowd from killing themselves, and to keep their families’ lawyers from suing when they manage to kill themselves anyway. We long ago reached warning saturation.

Then came alerts. They were calls to action, public notification of sincere dangers in the "new world" — as if previous times offered kinder, gentler dangers. Alerts, at first, were few and far between. But somewhere along the line, like kids with a bullhorn, the alert-keepers got drunk on the power that comes from being able to make everyone jump with the flip of a switch. Now it seems that even the useful ones, like the Amber Alert, stand a very good chance of being confused with every other alert that bombards us daily. This situation is complicated by the fact that Amber Alerts share a color palette with the most ridiculous alert system we have: the terror-alert color code. It’s like the entire alert universe is morphing into one big wall of anxiety, like a person constantly on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

Despite their ubiquity, these alerts still have the power to make us crazy. They’re like Russian roulette. You never know when that alert will have a bullet behind it and when it won’t. Alerts are becoming part of the waterfall that we just don’t hear anymore, but they still require us, if even on a subconscious level, to engage a world that most of us spend our time ignoring so we can concentrate on remembering the grocery list or rehashing the fight with our spouse or rehearsing our excuse for being late for work again. Alerts still have the ability to yank us out of all this and put us on a readiness footing. We aren’t used to being on a readiness footing, and all this alertness succeeds in nothing but making us sleepy and paranoid and a little bit confused — but not one bit safer. We walk around with our stomachs in knots because something bad might happen. Or not.

When the history of the early 21st century is written, will this be remembered as the Paranoid Decade? Will this be the era when we become a nation afraid of its own shadow? Will this be the time when we lose the last vestiges of our prized American bravado — the illusion of immortality that helped make this nation great — and sink into a perpetual psychological cringe, just waiting for the next shoe to drop? Heightened awareness of potential threats is one thing, but alert overload is psychological warfare. It’s a war waged by the alert-keepers with their bullhorns who want to convince us that the world we live in is so new and so dangerous that all those stodgy old constitutional concepts, like personal liberties, privacy, responsibility, and "keep your damn nose out of my business," are antiquated vestiges of a safer world and have no place here anymore. Will this be the decade when our national motto becomes "You Don’t Need Civil Liberties If You’re Not Doing Anything Wrong"? What will we eventually be willing to give up in exchange for peace of mind? What have we given up already? Will saying "Enough!" become adequate grounds for suspicion? As we sink further into alert overload and collective national paranoia, it might be wise to remember the words of Ben Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Kris Frieswick can be reached at k.frieswick@verizon.net