Not the Bran they're looking for

Would you exchange your Lucky Charms for a bowl of Marshmallow Mateys? How about pouring yourself some obnoxiously perky "Hearty Start" or vaguely nauseating "Amazon Flakes" instead of some honest old-fashioned Bran Flakes or their frosted cousins? I didn't think so, and it turns out, neither would Harvard students, reports the Boston Globe.

"I was shocked to see they had done this to our cereals. They replaced all of the familiar cereals with ones that have weird names and don't taste good." -Harvard senior

Yes, it's true- students at our nation's most elite educational institution are being forced to consume inferior brands of cereal for breakfast, and, knowing college students, probably for lunch and dinner as well. No good can come of this. If, as we all know, breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and students who eat a good breakfast do better in school, then what surer way to cripple America's future than to strike at the breakfasts of her best and brightest university students- those who will go on to become her politicians, her lawyers, her doctors, her college professors?

For there can be no doubt that these are the best and the brightest that we're dealing with. After all, this is Harvard. Why, mere sophomores are using SAT words in their everyday speech!

"While I am not a huge cereal fan... I would say that I am generally supportive of efforts to improve the quality of quotidian offerings." -Harvard sophomore

Fortunately, the students have wasted no time in demanding the return of their Cap'n Crunch and Frosted Mini-Wheats, nor have the brand-name cereals themselves been slow in responding to the crisis.

"It is disappointing for us to hear that any university would discontinue branded breakfast cereal," said Jamie Stein, a spokeswoman for Quaker Oats in Chicago. ''We expect the students to be even more disappointed."

Disappointment seems a woeful understatement, hardly an adequate response in the face of such an alarming situation. But even with the future of the Western world hanging in the balance, it's important that we not panic. If we can't keep a cool head on our collective shoulders, the terrorists have already won. We need to keep calm, like the cereal spokespeople, and seek nonviolent ways to protest this unjustice, like the Harvard students- peacefully voicing their discontent by setting up groups on thefacebook.com. Maybe in times like these what we really need to do is to to step back to the fundamentals and contemplate the wise words of David Roth, founder of Cereality:

"There's a fierce brand loyalty with cereal," he said. "Give people what they know and love. It's just something that nurtures and comforts them."

Such wisdom; so desperately needed, yet so rarely heard in our troubled times. If only we could all learn to follow such simple principles, surely the world would be a happier place. But we must begin at the breakfast table.