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boy, do I feel safe.
May. 12th, 2003 03:03 am...Advice of quite a different kind is to be found on the Ready.gov Web site: there, Americans are urged to make face masks out of towels or T-shirts for all family members to wear in the event of an unspecified attack that may release into the air what the site demotically if vaguely refers to as “junk.” Ridge said that on the evening of September 11, 2001, he faced the task of telling his kids not what had happened but why it had happened. “It is going to be a changed world for my children,” he said. “I am fifty-seven years old, and the time I’ve been alive has probably been the best time ever to be an American citizen. There was VietnamÑthat blip on the scene that caused some social unrestÑbut there was prosperity, and we didn’t have to worry about international terrorism.” He told his audience that his wife, Michele, had stocked the Ridge household in Maryland with sufficient water and provisions for three days, although he did not mention the fact, later provided by his press office, that there were also sufficient supplies for the family’s three Labradors.
The Ready campaign is supposed to strike a fine balance between being informative and being alarmist. Ridge told the editors, “You can be afraid, or you can be ready”Ñwhich happens to be the tag line of the campaign (with “we” in place of “you”). Ridge said that he hoped the Ready.gov campaign would be received with less skepticism than the suggestion, several months ago, that citizens arm themselves with duct tape. “I am one who believes that humor is a very powerful means of communicating troubling information,” he said. “But we got to a point where people were using the duct tape more to ridicule than to inform.”
Similarly disappointing was the way that the five-color alert system had been misunderstood: Codes Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue, and Green were not intended to alarm the public but to instruct “first responders”Ñfirefighters, the police, guards of public monumentsÑto put extra security precautions into effect. “We don’t want parents and children to think that it means anything other than that the government has determined that the risk of a terrorist attack is a little bit higher,” he said, which was meant to be reassuring. It was suggested to him that perhaps the five-color alert had been greeted with confusion and late-night-television waggery because the colors do not follow the spectrumÑblue and green are in the wrong orderÑand thus make no intuitive sense. Ridge looked surprised. “No one has ever said that to me before,” he said. “I guess I didn’t get a good mark in natural science. Next time I look at the rainbow, I’m going to think, I messed up.”
The message of Ready.gov, Ridge explained, differed from Cold War duck-and-cover drills. The current advisory for what to do in the event of a dirty-bomb or chemical attack, called Shelter-in-Place, is much more advanced than diving under a desk. “A radiological event is not a nuclear event,” he said. “The best thing to do is stay put, seal the windows and doors, and wait for the plume to move on...
The Ready campaign is supposed to strike a fine balance between being informative and being alarmist. Ridge told the editors, “You can be afraid, or you can be ready”Ñwhich happens to be the tag line of the campaign (with “we” in place of “you”). Ridge said that he hoped the Ready.gov campaign would be received with less skepticism than the suggestion, several months ago, that citizens arm themselves with duct tape. “I am one who believes that humor is a very powerful means of communicating troubling information,” he said. “But we got to a point where people were using the duct tape more to ridicule than to inform.”
Similarly disappointing was the way that the five-color alert system had been misunderstood: Codes Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue, and Green were not intended to alarm the public but to instruct “first responders”Ñfirefighters, the police, guards of public monumentsÑto put extra security precautions into effect. “We don’t want parents and children to think that it means anything other than that the government has determined that the risk of a terrorist attack is a little bit higher,” he said, which was meant to be reassuring. It was suggested to him that perhaps the five-color alert had been greeted with confusion and late-night-television waggery because the colors do not follow the spectrumÑblue and green are in the wrong orderÑand thus make no intuitive sense. Ridge looked surprised. “No one has ever said that to me before,” he said. “I guess I didn’t get a good mark in natural science. Next time I look at the rainbow, I’m going to think, I messed up.”
The message of Ready.gov, Ridge explained, differed from Cold War duck-and-cover drills. The current advisory for what to do in the event of a dirty-bomb or chemical attack, called Shelter-in-Place, is much more advanced than diving under a desk. “A radiological event is not a nuclear event,” he said. “The best thing to do is stay put, seal the windows and doors, and wait for the plume to move on...
