So, the Department of Homeland Security decided to issue a warning a few days ago via it’s twitter account about possible dangers associated with turkeys on Thanksgiving. You can see the tweet here. Of course, reading that headline conjured up quite a few thoughts about how turkeys could be used by the enemies of the United States to attack us on the most American of our annual holidays. After all, the DHS is charged with protecting the “homeland” from evil-doers both foreign and domestic. It regularly issues warnings about terrorist “chatter,” terror threat levels, and the like.
In my mind, I immediately started having images of turkeys stuffed with explosives, maybe poisoned at some point in the food chain, or otherwise used as weapons of mass destruction. I mean how low would the terrorists be to use the lowly turkey, the bird that Ben Franklin wanted to be the national symbol of our great land, to foist harm on our nation?
Well, my thoughts of an attack via incinerating Toms were quickly doused after reading that the warning was not about the turkey becoming the latest tool of terrorists. Nope. The Department of Homeland Security, the same agency that introduced the airport radiation spewing, crotch-grabbing policies of the TSA, is actually using our tax dollars to warn us about the dangers of using deep fryers to cook our turkeys for this year’s Thanksgiving dinners!
Of all the nanny-state things for the federal government to feel they need to warn about, frying turkeys should be at the bottom of the list. Hell, it shouldn’t even be ON the list. We’ve been cooking turkeys in every possible way since before Dolly Madison stitched together the country’s first flag. If there’s one thing we don’t need the feds to warn us about, it’s how to cook a turkey! I won’t be surprised when the DHS warns us in December about the dangers of Christmas lights and menorah candles.
If we even need to have a Department of Homeland Security, they should stick to catching the bad guys and leave the holidays to us.