Brickbat: This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

For the past 15 years, Anne Tabat has met her children's school bus each Friday in Chanhassen, Minnesota, with a plate of cookies for the driver and the students. But she says she the driver recently told her the students can no longer have the cookies and since they can't have any he thinks it best if he doesn't, either. Someone later called her from the school district saying one person had complained. Tabat said if the problem was a food allergy or something like that she'd work around it, but she has never got an explanation for why that person complained.
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
My god, there's a heckler's veto on cookies.
A super volcano would be a blessing.
Some parents live to complain, so allow them that gift this holiday season. If you want to do something, cookie lady, find out which parent complained so the kids can thank that person's child personally.
They'll probably give the complainer eggs, them being generous little tykes.
Make the complainer into soylent veal.
Claim you have Sixth Amendment rights here. And suggest that the complaining parent is a bully and use this as a lesson in the need to stop bullying.
Don't make the kid suffer.
"Window war" the parent.
she knew that someday, someone would complain and that would be that
Is that Cookie Lady's Law?
Find them and kill them!
Today it's cookies, tomorrow it's heroin. Think of teh childrunz!
But think, if they turn to cocaine instead, they'll be the world leaders of tomorrow!
Shouldn't we give the kids cocaine instead of cookies to solve the obesity problem?
New Original formula coke?
The whole thing sounds kinda siolly to me dude.
http://www.BeinAnon.tk
Someone from the school district will start passing out approved cookies. Then, someone will say, "Without government, who would pass out these cookies?"
No one, because government approved cookies are crap. Have you ever had them?
Is she licensed? Has her kitchen been properly inspected? Have her recipes been reviewed and approved? Has she been tested for TB?
Until she has asked permission and obeyed orders from the proper government authorities, there is no way to be sure that her cookies are safe. So until then they must be treated like poison.
And of course, the person who complained wanted to pretect her child, so she ordered her child to not take any cookies. Which, of course, caused that child to suffer ridicule from the rest of them for having a controlling mother, and we can't have that happen, either.
The only solution is to forbid everyone from eating cookies, or do anything that anyone finds objectionable. I.e., collective punishment because one individual can't deal with an otherwise innocuous aspect of society.
I am tempted to call this a "race to the bottom", but I don't think it is quite correct. Maybe we need a new saying to describe this trend. Race to equality? Race to conformity? Race to ???
Equality is the lowest common denominator.
Race to the finish line on the Road to Serfdom.
When you can't equalize up, equalize down.
Yeah, this is really about parenting. Some parent doesn't want their kid eating cookies but also doesn't want to teach their kid to say 'no thanks' or accept that their kid will eat the cookie against their wishes - therefore, no one get's cookie. Bitch.
After 15 years i think her kids are getting into their teens...
Could very well be one of them who are embarrassed by their mom showing up with cookies at the bus stop.
Kids these days are all about the hip moms and counter cultural social norms to the previous counter cultural social norms. Didn't you see 21 jump street?
Well, it could have gone the other way, with an official "cookie baker" program. Look at what's become of the simple NORAD Santa Tracking announcement:
"In 1955, a local newspaper advertisement invited children to call Santa but mistakenly listed the hotline of NORAD's predecessor. Rather than disappoint the kids, commanders told them they indeed knew where Santa was. NORAD, a U.S.-Canadian operation based at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colo., continues the tradition every Christmas Eve."
- from abcnews.go.com
Sounds simple, right. Gives the guys working the holiday something to do, and made a few kids happy. And who can forget Walter Cronkite announcing that NORAD opened up the airspace for Santa during the cold war? Well, take that simple message and amplify it for today's overbuilt military, form a few committees, and now we have this abomination (sponsored by Microsoft):
http://www.noradsanta.org
This video, if you can get through it, shows just how bad things have gotten:
http://www.uasvision.com/2013/.....ideo-2013/
What happened to the right to face your accuser?
You have no rights, prole.