I was never in the Boy Scouts. Our family wasn’t the joining type. We mostly steered clear of organizations of all kinds. If we wanted to go bowling, we went to the bowling alley and did bowling things. Matching shirts were not required. Enough of my friends were Boy Scouts, however, for me to know what’s involved. I got to wondering how the Boy Scout ethos is holding up after all these years.
Come to think of it, I’m not sure the Boy Scouts even exists anymore. I seem to recall rather a lot of lawsuits. I better check.
Well, I’m back. Sure enough, if you squint hard enough, the Boys Scouts still exists. Except it’s just not for boys anymore, which in most ways defeats its stated purpose. But it’ll still do for the purposes of our discussion. The Scouts take an oath. Oaths used to be pretty serious public declarations of intent. Way back when, oaths were understood to be the Terms of Service consent form for standing outside the Pearly Gates with some ‘splainin’ to do if you broke them. The only thing people adhere to as rigidly as an oath nowadays is a grudge over someone who took your parking space. Every other promise seems pretty conditional at this point.
Anyway, the Scout Oath says you’ll obey the Scout Law, which reads as follows:
A Scout is Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean and Reverent.
I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot here, but a Scout should also put a comma after Clean, as God and Strunk and White intended. But let’s not quibble. That’s a pretty good rundown of how a good male citizen should behave. I have no idea how a good female citizen should behave. I’ve only met one in the last thirty years, and I married her, so the sample size is too small to make any sweeping judgments.
Since the scouts of all flavors include girls now, you could assume that they intend for girls to act like boys, but I am beset by doubts on that score. Making all the boys into little girls is probably more like it. I’ve noticed that the gender uniformity river only flows one way. But a good citizen is a good citizen, wherever you find one. Let’s see how well the average citizen is adhering to the precepts of Scout Law, with or without the BSA’s ministrations in their yute. Let’s go to Walmart!
If there’s anyplace better than Wallie World to put your finger on the pulse of society, I’m glad I haven’t experienced it. I’m not sure if the county lockup or a methadone clinic would be a sideways move, or a downward hop from our tiny town Wallie World. Since it’s basically the only game in town, you get a good blast of what most people are like, because most people are required to go there if they want stuff like groceries or clothes named George.
I essentially never leave my house, so I’m going to rely on my wife’s rundown of the goings on at the Walton’s Rodeo Drive for Rodeo clowns. She always returns from grocery shopping there somewhat haggard. I ask her about her trips the way Henry Hill queries Karen after her trip to see Jimmy the Gent. She likes to pause to compose herself first, and of course wash herself thoroughly with bleach, including her eyes. Then we get down to it. I’ll see if I can compare tales from her most recent trip to the entries in the Scout Law, and see how Ammurhiga is shaping up recently.
- Trustworthy: Everything smaller than a mainframe computer is locked up in cages in the electronics department. Someone is stationed at the self-checkout to see if you’re putting a sticker from the bananas on a flat screen, and they’d like to see your receipt on the way out the door. Hard fail.
- Loyal: Well, everyone in town shops there, but that’s because it put everything else out of business, so you can’t draw dispositive conclusions from that. Everything in the building that comes in a box is from China, so I guess that’s a kind of loyalty. You know, to Deng Xiaoping. Partial pass.
- Helpful: Wallie World has helpfully removed all the helpers from their buildings. There are a few people who will help you put seven canned hams into one shopping bag on top of your eggs, but that’s about it. Partial pass.
- Friendly: There are still big circular stickers on the floors to keep the patrons from coming within six feet of each other, lest infection or knifefights break out. Hard fail.
- Courteous: My wife stood in line behind a woman with “FUCK AROUND AND FIND OUT” in very large letters on the back of her T-shirt. I’d say that about covers both “courteous” and “friendly,” wouldn’t you? And it also shows that unisex scouting is having a negligible effect on any old gender. Hard, hard fail.
- Kind: My wife, who is 100% of Italian descent, and has spoken Italian to Italians in Italy, often asks for Genoa salami at the deli counter. The clerks behind the counter always kindly correct her correct pronunciation of Genoa by asking, “Do you mean Jenn OH ah salami?” Every. Single. Time. Hard fail.
- Obedient: Everyone in the ten items or less line has forty items in their cart. Hard fail.
- Cheerful: If anyone ever smiled in a Wallie World, they’d have them stuffed and displayed.
- Thrifty: Thrifty? People driving $80,000 pickup trucks with 7-year mortgages on them are buying 80″ televisions with payday loans to hang in their single-wide trailers. Let’s change the subject.
- Clean: Wallie world is the first place outside the heavy construction industry where people wake up dirty, and pick up more barnacles as the day progresses. Hard, hard, hard fail.
- Reverent: The churches are empty, but the Wallie World is packed. Draw you own conclusions.
So it appears that adding girls to the Boy Scouts didn’t do the trick of making good citizens. I think we need to add all the adults, too, and even geriatrics to the membership. We’ll need about five hundred Cardinal Richelieu types in charge of it to start over properly. And we should get that guy from Ben Hur that hits the post with big mallets in the trireme to indicate ramming speed to supervise the meetings.
[Update: Many thanks to Bob for his generous contribution to the tip jar. Contributions like his keep this blog, and blogger, going.]
6 Responses
I also never joined the scouts; my group tended towards the less organized type of gang.
When the eldest reached the age, he decided he wanted to join the cubs down at the local catholic church. So I of course was able to ‘volunteer’ , so to speak, and went off to a training session sponsored by the local diocese. The first thing the guy told us was “When you are doing scouting, you all will be like nuns (a giggle from the audience), You will always travel in pairs. Always. You will never be alone with a child that is not your own.”
A couple of years later, the kid lost interest, so I stepped carefully away.
As things progressed, I noted people getting mad at the B.S.A. for not being willing to change with the times, I asked one of the trainers I knew (a lawyer) why they kept on, and he response was:
Consent decrees. Over the years they’ve been sued so many times, and signed so many consent degrees that they can’t change how they do something or they’ll be in contempt of court. Until everybody involved dies.
A local Boy Scout troop provides a color guard for monthly meetings in my city council district. Every month they show up in uniform with flags to bear. Their overall appearance, like creatures that just slouched out of the laundry hamper, pretty much puts the lie to Clean and Reverent. I wonder which consent decree brought that about.
Wow. Maybe it’s just being in the NW corner of Wyoming, but the Wally World (yes, different spelling) in our little town isn’t anything like that.
The folks who work here are our neighbors, and there’s more than one time that I’ve been looking for something, and asked an acquaintance where I could find it. They’ll sigh, and tell us that “corporate” made them move it somewhere unfindable for reasons that will never be known to mortal man. Our fellow shoppers (also our neighbors) will look at empty sections of shelves, sigh, and we’ll commiserate about how the truck must not have made it in with that load because of the snow in the passes. We’ll look at the price on the beef, sigh, and go over to the chicken section together. All told, it’s mostly just sighing together.
It’s usually the checkout that’s the price you pay for low prices. There will be 2 or 3 stations open with 20 people lined up behind each one, with 200 unstaffed stations along the way. Everybody just kind of sighs, and makes small talk about the weather, or big talk about how the dot-gov is screwing things up, and wait patiently for our turn to cough up the dough.
I actually enjoy going there and seeing the vast expanse of goods available for the average person, and thank the gods for the spider-web thin skein of civilization that holds it together. For now.
Jackson or Dubois?
Here in my town, we have many new families moving in to be in the “wide open spaces–to experience the wilderness”. The kids in these families have never been outside without adult (female) supervision. These are not minority children–these are white kids from upper middle-class families. They are afraid to touch the bark of a tree. It’s inconceivable that they would walk down a short trail (end in site) without someone with them. Sitting on the ground is a difficult inconvenience. It goes on and on.
I asked around for the local Boy Scouts and like you found that they have been forced to merge with the Girl Scouts. I found one male working in tandem with two females in an effort to bring their very small troop to the outdoors. These were kids about 9-11 years of age. I took the male leader aside and asked him if it was possible to do a “boys only” event. He got this horrible shocked look on his face and was adamant that that was not a possibility. DH and I have a nice perfect place for young people to experience the wilderness. I am planning to start my own “boys only” event! They should have several dads with them of course. We have to do something to stop this horrible devastation!
Second item. Thank you, thank you, thank you for the Oxford comma!
About a decade ago, I cooked up a field project for my undergrad statistics students, a survey of the trees in a large park in San Antonio. In two successive Saturdays, we used forestry sampling techniques to estimate the number and size distribution of the parks trees. A constant concern among the students was “What if we get lost in the woods?” My answer was simple, “Walk in a straight line, you’ll hit a street. Then you won’t be lost.”