“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.
I never saw anything like that, my Scoutmaster was a stoner. Any person in charge of children who is a predator should be drawn and quartered, in the old-fashioned way.
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.
It’s not hard to get to Eagle. I stopped because I moved schools, went to high school, and was off and running. Being independent was never my weakness.
My favorite experience watching scouts cook was when the new patrol had brought steak to eat. The patrol leader announced at his house they boiled steak not cook it on the grill over the fire. I watched them boil perfectly good steaks that evening.
Aaaagh. But, yeah, I wouldn’t have stopped them.
Gasoline and perfume ended my scouting career. Here is a thought on richer. my Aunt asked me to look at some old coins she had. She pulled out a one ounce Kruggerand with a receipt from1976 it was purchased for 159.66. She almost fell over when I told her the now price of 4500. Yep we have lots more money.
We do.
John – – I have been an adult Boy Scout leader for more than 40 years, so I agree that BSA sold its character to big corp donors for fleeting money.
These corp donations were threatened with cessation if BSA didn’t accept “ghay”Scouts, even though BSA had won a lawsuit in 1995 at the U.S. Supreme Court (the Dale case) ruling that it didn’t have to accept a ghay boy (from Mexicalipornia no less) into its ranks. The Supremes said that the 1st Amendment has freedom of association and that means that private groups are allowed to NOT ASSOCIATE with those they choose to not accept. Note that few 12 year old boys would know or come out as ghay, but the litigation was to force behaviors on a decent, pro-religious and patriotic movement that reinforced American values, instead of Libarhoid sleeze….
Then the corporates seeing that BSA didn’t knuckle under over ghay boys being admitted began pushing for ghay adult leaders to be allowed dangling the bucks that BSA National Office needed to keep the squirrel cage spinning.
And that led to ghay adults being given access to youths which in turn led to HUGE NUMBERS OF LAWSUITS like the ones the Catholic Church went through a decade earlier.
BSA may still be paying damages to Plaintiffs and now has inflated everything it charges to pay for the extra insurance due to its recent unsavory history…. My four grandchildren are registered now in Cub program to the annual individual registration cost of $185 ! ! ! And the handbooks are $20 each ….
To help keep the cage spinning, BSA National morphed into Scouting USA! It now takes in girls in the Cub and Troop level programs. Girls were not new to BSA since BSA had, since the 1990’s, Explorer and Venture programs for high school age boys and girls.
The Girl Scouts screamed bloody murder at this change because it would pinch a sizeable number of girls, leaders and support away from their already dwindling programs (which had shifted focus toward inner cities and away from outdoor rural activities…).
Our boys need Scouting, especially those being raised by single Moms. They need to be around real men who have stable lives and religious foundation to help teach LIFE LESSONS to those who may lack positive male role models. And now with the rise of home schooling, boys need to be part of teams that expose them to their peers in a male supervised environment which builds character. And as you said, John, helps them accept disappointment through failure before then learning how to become successful in the somewhat competitive meritocratic environment that Scouts provides.
10 4 the problem is I never heard one incident of a predator leader being dealt with by the other leadership
BSA is selling off anything they can, and the membership is so low that they can’t afford to keep it going without huge dues.
here is a thought for young folks
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XWSPS0_BYWw?feature=share
Good vid.
Map the decline and fall of BSA to that of traditional two parent homes. No dads, no boy scouts. When the moms took over it went soft and gay into the night with a whimper.
Women always had an important role in Boy Scouts as well as sports and other civic and social fraternal organizations. Those roles were limited and complimented by the father’s headship.
Back in the day the matriculation of Cub Scouts into Boy Scouts represented one such limitation in which it was largely unspoken but basically “you get the boys until around age 10 and then we take them out in the woods and show them how the world actually works.” Some cultures its much younger but same deal.
“We” decided that there could be no male spaces and so now we have a shortage of men. Go figure. Plenty of males went along with it because happy wife happy life and strong independent daughters who wanted to do cool stuff too and the dual-income trap and feminist delusion rendered the treasure chest of traditions handed down for generations of the feminine skills of homemaking and homesteading and domestic husbandry not just obsolete but low status.
So, all that was left was the moral imperative of exercising the female free option on everything male, which is a blind spot in most men that persists to this day. The progressive moral imperative is the dominant monocultural quasi-religion across the land, red or blue or city or rural.
Mom was den mother for us in cub scouts and dad was scout master for the older kids. We still got to go on the scout hikes and camping trips. By the time we were old enough to be in scouts, dad had soured on the BSA. We still had little league, though.
As the BSA declined, so did men.
I never got into Cub Scouts or Boy Scouts or Little League or anything that woulda anchored me in the world as part of a team instead of the hermit introvert I’ve become. My dad worked swing shift and didn’t push me much into anything once I exhibited no interest or skill in school basketball, his own big youthful pursuit. These days my stepson, a good man, is an adult “scoutmaster” in the “new” Christian “Boy Scouts” called Trail Life. His own 13 year old son is decidedly less than enthusiastic about forced participation. Hopefully in retrospect one day James will realize just how lucky he really is.
https://www.traillifeusa.com/
Hopefully Trail Life gives some of the good things that the BSA did.
I went to one Scout meeting and realized it wasn’t for me. I didn’t want to have to wear a uniform, and we were already doing most of the things like camping, hunting, fishing, etc. on our own without adult supervision. We were fortunate to have a bunch of woods behind our house, so we were always doing something outside.
That being said, I do think there is (or was) tremendous value in Scouting, particularly for kids who don’t have access to nature.
I grew up “free range” but now kids are scheduled and henned over on everything. Sad.
My phrenology was Cromagnon anti-social and I LOL.
I don’t loathe suiciety that much but can always upgrade.
Hot blondes you have chosen wisely.
Mine is Neandertal.