Late one night, I caught a creepy commercial from the Department of Homeland Security featuring a little girl sitting at a breakfast table, looking up at the camera and asking her parents if they had a plan for the family to remain safe and together during a terrorist attack.
I remember the good old days when the only evacuation plan you had to have was a fire escape plan, and even then my family took the "we should be so lucky" approach and didn’t even have one of those. There's just something about establishing contingency plans for dealing with improbable emergencies that seems to run counter to the American spirit.
Indeed, despite Homeland Security’s efforts, polls reveal most Americans have not so much as started a stockpile to prepare for terrorist strikes. I think a new approach is needed, one that shifts the joy of perpetual vigilance to a segment of society too often left out of protecting the homeland: kids. It's high time to send in the Terror Scouts.
Too busy to keep track of the color-coded threat level? Just look for a friendly neighborhood Terror Scout! Scouts’ uniforms, which they’re required to wear at all times, change with the threat level to keep all who see them just frightened enough to appreciate their freedom.
Do you really want to ask your boss, neighbor or teacher if they have a terrorism plan in place and sound like a paranoid kook? Just wait for a troop of patrolling Terror Scouts to drop by and save you the mental anguish!
And who’s really going to lug around the recommended emergency supply kit, including a three-day supply of food and water, a full set of winter clothes and a veritable toolbox? The Terror Scouts with their trusty backpacks, that’s who!
Terror Scouts will also earn merit badges: the coveted duct-taping proficiency badge, a badge for every citizen with a cough the scout involuntarily quarantines as a potential "patient zero," even one for taking care of "personal sanitation" with garbage bags and twister seals, like the Homeland Security boys ask you to be prepared to do if there's an actual attack!
Most notably, Terror Scouts will, in the sweet name of Lady Liberty, vanquish this winter season from Girl Scout tyranny by injecting a little cookie competition. That’s right, move over Thin Mint infidels, it’s time for patriotic Coconut Cream Condies, Wolfie Wafers and Rootin’ Tootin’ "W" Macaroons!
Collectible Terror Scout Cookie boxes will feature lively comics of Bush administration officials battling terror! Grab a box of Alberto’s Guantanamo Delights, featuring the new attorney general "interrogating" a chamber full of uncooperative microbe bioterrorists by siccing vicious Sea Monkeys on them, pulling off their cilia one by one and flagellating them with their own flagella!
Do you want your dessert dollars going to send a bunch of beret-wearing, marshmallow-roasting, macaroni-art-making floozies in knee socks to summer camp? Or would you rather support a brave band of scrappy young heroes in their only-ending-under-penalty-of-military-conscription-upon-turning-18 quest to protect your freedom?
That’s what I thought. Now, pass the Oatmeal Raisin Rummies–they’ll go Abu Ghraib on your taste buds!
Holly Noe’s column runs each Friday. True story, the Girl Scouts wouldn’t let her join as a child. Write to her at [email protected].