“The things you own end up owning you.” – Fight Club
The world spins on its axis. That really makes my day.
I used to be a Scoutmaster®. That was in the time before Scouting™ became fully woke, attempting to appease those who only wanted to kill it. I get it, I get it, those dollars were sexy and the BSA© was a little drunk and just couldn’t say no.
Still, if the BSA™ did it for the money, it’s pretty clear what that makes them.
I digress.
I think Scouting® had been a very valuable program. I know that the scouts in the troop I was the Scoutmaster© for turned out pretty well.
The secret, as far as I could tell, was to allow the scouts to run the program. I mean, it was called “Boy Scouts™” and not “Adult Scouts©”. The program wasn’t set up for the comfort of old men with checkbooks and a La-Z-Boy© at home.
I’m an armchair psychologist. Just yesterday I diagnosed my recliner with schizophrenia.
The first thing that I did when I became Scoutmaster© was to immediately stop the sharing of food between adults and boys. I had noticed that whenever dinner depended on what the kids cooked, the adults got involved because they didn’t want to eat awful food or crap.
Not on my watch.
The boys would plan their meals, cook their food, and clean up without adult intervention. This led to more than one tragic crime against the culinary arts, but I and the other adults always ate pretty well. The big lesson for me was that if I let them alone, they’d eventually figure it out. And if they burned dinner, they could go without or move to the next day’s lunch.
No one starved, but they got better and better at preparing and cooking.
Me? I got better and better at planning.
Don’t talk to me about fashion, it’ll just go in one year and out the other.
My first BSA© camping trip out was some 20 years after my teenage backpacking days on Wilder Mountain. I read the manual, and it said “be prepared” so my first loadout camping was approximately 300 pounds of gear, most of which was entirely unused for the weekend.
After four years and the BSA© abandoning all pretense at being Morally Straight, I packed for my last campout with the troop. My loadout?
A sleeping bag, cot, tent, toothbrush, lamp, folding chair, and book. Maybe there were a few other items, like extra socks. If it had been summer I would have taken bug spray.
I don’t often have international fashion models in my house, but when I do they manifest directly out of the bathroom counter.
The difference in the amount of kit was based on two thoughts: first, I’m going to a campground for a weekend, not attempting a solo summit of K2. Second, being away from the everyday luxuries of life was the point of camping. Over the years, I had determined that I could do without almost anything for a weekend camping trip.
Almost anything. I’m quite fond of air.
That was also one of the purposes for the boys involved in the program. They needed to learn that they could plan and execute a trip, and do without televisions and cell phones and fluffy mattresses and mayonnaise and soda pop for a weekend. That was one of the more enjoyable parts of the job, really, watching kids doing without and building competence and self-determination in a world that wants to make them helpless and dependent.
Sure, watching them fail again and again was hilarious, but failure was the point. And doing without was the point. And coming from a world of plenty, the boys loved the chance to make real decisions, take action, and live with the consequences.
In our current world, I think that we have created a dystopia where whatever isn’t mandatory is prohibited, and the idea of a kid going without a Friday meal because they burned it will make people seethe with anger.
If being a 23 year old Irish swimwear model has taught me anything, it’s that catfishing is surprisingly easy online.
Going to bed with a meagre supper is a consequence of bad skill, and the next time the boys took better care of their cooking so it wasn’t carbonized. To tell the truth, the carbonized noodles looked more edible than the chicken tartare. I mean, it was tartare on the inside, but blowtorched on the outside like it had spent an afternoon in Vulcan’s forge.
I still shudder at that thought, but, hey, I didn’t have to eat it. But in the future . . . ?
It may be that we will soon enter a time where the nation as a whole becomes much poorer than it is today. Poorer means less material wealth, and fewer . . . things. To be fair, the things I need the most don’t cost all that much in the first place. Books are inexpensive, and I have about 20 feet worth of books that I have planned to read. Poorer lands will have fewer dinner courses.
Economists have told us that we are much wealthier now than we were in the 1950s or 1980s. Okay. But I certainly don’t think that the average person is happier now despite being able to communicate with virtually everyone on the planet in an instant.
I hear that the iPhone’s® battery is called Apple© Juice™.
When I grew up, when the phone rang, we ran to it so we could answer it to see who might be on the other end of the line. As phone calls were expensive then, it was rare to get someone wanting to sell me something, so almost every call was someone reaching out, not something to avoid.
In the end, what makes us better is our competence, and what weakens us is being dependent upon luxury.
Except booze. Apparently neither the BSA© nor I turn that down.
My dad was in Boy Scouts for a bit as a kid, but quit because the Scoutmaster was a pedo. He was Assistant Scoutmaster when my brother and I were in Scouts to make sure we weren’t prey.
My dad died when I was 16, the Scoutmaster retired, I got my Eagle with a new Scoutmaster, and in college I learned that hundreds of videos and thousands of photos of naked boys were found at the old Scoutmaster’s camp that we worked on and stayed at.
I guess getting sent to Thailand by the Air Force during Vietnam provided the start and being a lawyer and Scoutmaster provided the means and opportunity, especially with single mothers sending their boys to “learn some man stuff” they couldn’t teach.
Circle of life, I guess.
The BSA for me was uneventful. Nowhere near enough badges to be an Eagle. Before we moved back home to Jackson, MS when I was 10, was a Cub Scout in Chicago. Our Scoutmaster had a cabin on Lake Geneva, WI. Road trip weekend every June. The Playboy Mansion was directly across the lake. We fought over the binoculars.
Sadly, no topless babes.