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Let troops eat homemade cake or cookies — sheesh!
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Sometimes good intentions, logical procedures and going by the book will take you to a ridiculous place. It happened to Bangor International Airport.
According to the Associated Press, since 2003 volunteers known as the Maine Troop Greeters have been welcoming troops coming through the airport on their way to or from Iraq and Afghanistan with homemade cookies, brownies, fudge and other assorted treats like strawberries and Girl Scout cookies.
The airport even allocated a room to the volunteers, who have welcomed almost 500,000 troops as a way to show support and thanks. But no longer.
Airport authorities became concerned about liability issues — America the litigious, you know — and the fact that the food being homemade is not prepared, said the AP, under the same “strict regulations on food preparation, temperature control and handling” that govern the airport’s concessionaires.
The airport said the crackdown was not prompted by concessionaire complaints about loss of business, although no franchise with any public-relations sense at all would put such an objection in writing.
Nowhere in all this does it seem that anybody asked the troops what they thought. Our guess is that a smile and a taste of home made their arrivals a little merrier and their departures a little less sad.
Here’s a suggestion: Let the troops decide. Put up a warning sign in the Troop Greeters’ room alerting those who are going to or coming from combat that the cookies, fudge, brownies or whatever have been made in the volunteers’ own kitchens, free of any federal, state or local supervision, and that, even though almost a half-million of their fellow soldiers have eaten them without harm, the troops do so at their own risk.
Risk, as we know, is something they understand. And take a couple extra brownies to eat on the flight, soldier.
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