But what about the cookies?

Last week, a conservative student group at Southern Methodist University caused a flurry of controversy by holding an "affirmative action bake sale." Signs announced that cookies for white males cost $1, but were only 50 cents for Hispanics and a quarter for blacks. \nThe University shut down the bake sale after 45 minutes because they feared it was creating an unsafe environment for students. The conservative group claimed "free speech." A black student filed a discrimination complaint. \n"This was not an issue about free speech," said Tim Moore, director of the Hughes-Trigg Student Center at SMU. "It was really an issue where we had a hostile environment being created that was potentially volatile," (The Associated Press, Thursday).\nDamn right it was a hostile environment, Tim -- for those poor, innocent cookies.\nNo one seemed to notice, but the real potential danger in this event was to the bystanding baked goods. This is simply unacceptable. Bringing a pastry into a volatile situation is immoral. The only thing those cookies were guilty of was being delicious. Now their good name is spread all over the news; it's connected with controversy and all people can talk about is whether it was right or wrong.\nI'll tell you what's wrong. Defacing a cookie's good reputation.\nLabeling a cookie three or four different prices can only lead to a traumatic identity crisis for that cookie. These cookies are young; they've probably only been out of the oven for four or five hours. They don't know who they are yet. They don't yet know that they have a yummy place in this world. You wouldn't call your newborn three or four different names. So how could you do it to an equally vulnerable cookie?\nFortunately, IU students can be confident that only ethical pastry practices go on at their University. Suzette May, supervisor of the Sugar & Spice bakery in the Indiana Memorial Union, assured me that her establishment was "absolutely opposed" to subjecting their products to a dangerous environment.\n"We'd never put our chocolate chunks in a precarious situation like that," she said.\nMay added that a gingerbread person's self worth would never be compromised the way the baked items were at Southern Methodist. Every gingerbread person is the same price. And it looks like they're all treated well, too. \nIf your student group is going to thrust cookies into media, it had better be good news. A group of conscientious elementary schoolers in Virginia had the right idea. Last year the 3rd-graders at Oak Grove Elementary made headlines in the Roanoke Times when they donated 2,002 cookies to Roanoke's Rescue Mission. \n"At the Rescue Mission, not many people probably get cookies," 8-year-old Jimmy Howe pointed out to the Times. \nIf Jimmy could figure it out, why couldn't the students at SMU? \nRuth Graves Wakefield would roll over in her grave if she knew that the chocolate chip cookie she invented in the 1930s would someday be the tool of some witty student's political agenda. A woman doesn't graduate from the Framingham State Normal School Department of Household Arts to have her most delectable creation swiped up by debate-hungry newsmongers. She didn't bake those cookies for you to go arguing your First Amendment rights, she baked them to please the palates of the guests at Toll House Inn. So don't push it.\nCookies belong in our mouths and hearts -- not in the news. Give the limelight to those who want it, not to the tasty little morsels that lay sweetly on your baking sheet. They didn't ask for it. And it's not their role. \nA very wise monster once said, "C is for cookie, that's good enough for me." It should be good enough for you, too.