In an Orange State of Mind

A CSO ponders his role—and yours—in shaping our post-9/11 democracy

By Anonymous

October 01, 2004 — CSO — Yeah, I know this column is supposed to be anonymous, but it's important for you to know that I work in one of the terror capitals of the world, New York City, especially since this column is about how CSOs should be responding to terrorist alerts. It's sort of like knowing that Batman works in Gotham City without knowing that the Bat Cave is under Bruce Wayne's mansion.

In New York there are Orange days, and then there are really dazzlingly bright, all-you-can-see-or-read-about-in-the-news Orange days. That's because the city has been under an orange or elevated warning level ever since Sept. 11, 2001. The Department of Homeland Security doesn't want to lower it because that might be construed as being lax on terrorism. Yet they don't want to raise it to red when they have warnings of an attack because that might be viewed as being too alarmist. In New York, being alarmist means you scare the markets, which means you make lots of rich people lose money, which makes them very unhappy, which means please, don't do that anymore - or else. So, I chug along to work every day in a perpetually Orange city.

For this column, let's depart from the standard "this is what you must do to guard against terrorism," which I'm guessing you've already heard many times before. Instead, I'd like to examine the broader implications that a perpetually Orange state has had on people's daily lives and on the body politic. What's more, given those changes, what challenges does this present for security officers?

First, 9/11 and the Iraqi war have caused a definite change in attitudes toward the military. Historically, Americans have feared a large standing army. The founding fathers suffered under the abuses of the British occupation army, and as a result they wrote into the Bill of Rights provisions against the abuses of forced quartering (Third Amendment), unreasonable search and seizure (Fourth Amendment), and cruel and unusual punishment (Eighth Amendment).

Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution makes provisions for Congress to "raise and support armies" but to "provide and maintain a Navy"a subtle but important distinction. The thinking was that an army was something needed only in times of war or national crisis and that it was to be disbanded whenever that time passed. A large standing army was thought to be a threat to democracy because of the potential for establishing a military dictatorship. A navy, on the other hand, was assumed to always be needed to defend American shores from potential invasion. Because navies would be away at sea, they were presumably less of a threat to the democratically elected government.

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