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She did. While your wife did not seek to enrich herself and may have even done the community some good by getting the utility to respond to a potential danger, she erred by exploiting her position with the nonprofit for personal advantage. This is cronyism: Those with connections get their poles fixed promptly; those without get to enjoy the spectacle of a tumbling pole, a power outage or, as I, a person with no electrical knowledge, understand it, a lightning bolt that splits the world in lowest airfares twain.More discreditable is the conduct of the head of the utility. It is a fine thing for an executive to respond to customer concerns, but not so fine to secure better service for his pals than other customers. This fellow abused his position by overriding the ordinary procedures and priorities for repairs, jumping a friend to the head of the line. Work lowest airfares crews should be dispatched according to the gravity of a problem, not the intimacy of a social connection.Of course, you can't be certain that this is what happened. The swift repair could have been a belated response to your first call. Or the boss could have discerned lowest airfares its urgency. And that new lotion I (pretend to have) bought could give me a rich, luxuriant head of hair.I flew out of Denver International Airport shortly after a bad storm and spent three hours in the security line. First-class passengers had no wait because the Transportation Security Administration allowed them to skip to the front of the line. Security costs are shared by the airlines and taxpayers. Should preference be given to first-class passengers?Allison Moule,Broomfield, Colo.While airlines share the cost of passenger screening, they also share the cost, through their taxes, lowest airfares of state troopers. But when a first-class flier gets a speeding ticket, he is treated like everyone else. Passengers submit to screening as a legal obligation; all should be treated the same. To establish a short line for those who pay more and an endless line for those who pay less violates the spirit of equal treatment under the law - unlike when an airline provides comfy first-class seats and miserable coach seats, which is not a legal situation (but, rather, a perverse psychological experiment).Societies, lowest airfares particularly democratic societies, are built on shared experience, especially in times of crisis, and airport screening is certainly a response to crisis. Even before the draft disappeared, we had long since abandoned the Civil War practice of letting the lowest airfares rich opt out of military service by hiring substitutes. Similarly, the moneyed - among whom are influential people who helped shape this very policy - should not be exempt from those exasperatingly long lines.Readers can direct their questions and comments This column originates in The New York Times Magazine.