Warning! New threat warning system.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has decided that a new threat warning system is in order. The current system has five, color-coded levels:

Low/Green -- we hope everything will be okay, but you never can tell, and isn’t green a nice, non-threatening color?

Guarded/Blue -- we have this sort of floating anxiety; it makes us feel blue

Elevated/Yellow -- it seems about time something bad happened and we’re getting really scared

High/Orange -- we’ve heard some rumors that something bad is going to happen and that makes us think of exploding pumpkins

Severe/Red -- suspicious people seem to be chatting a lot about stuff that doesn’t make any sense to us and it reminds us of the “Red Scare.”

Since its inception, the DHS threat level has mostly cycled back and forth between yellow and orange, initially keeping everyone on edge until most people learned to ignore it and focus instead on steadily more intrusive airport security procedures.

DHS has finally admitted that they don’t really have the intelligence (double meaning) to discriminate between the five levels, so they’ve tossed three levels and now have just these two:

Elevated threat alert -- the previous four threat levels wrapped into one nebulous level we were going to color code puce, but Janet wouldn’t let us

Imminent threat alert -- be afraid, be VERY afraid (and vote Democratic/Republican)

I feel better already. How about you?