Be, be, be prepared, the motto of the boy scouts. I have always thought and still think that is sound advice. The Boy Scouts of America like to believe that they are teaching boys to become leaders. Leadership is the ultimate goal of scouting, so they say. In reality, it’s about making boys into functioning beta providers for an America that no longer exists (and may never have truly existed except in the idealized version of America that they promote).
The scout slogan is ‘Do a good turn daily.’ Endearing sentiment that canl get you fleeced in the wrong situation. It does not necessarily mean you should be a doormat, but can easily turn out that way.
Let’s see. The scout oath? On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to god and my country and to obey the scout law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight. Wait a minute. What’s the scout law? A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. Do you see what I mean? Both the oath and the law were written in 1910 and have been unchanged since then.
Prior to the rise of the four sirens of the female apocalypse these were good things to instill in young boys. The fact that boys would recite this stuff over and over again meant that it was ingrained into the fiber of their being. Literally a piece of who and what they were and are. The old commitment and consistency framework of influence.
Penn and Teller had a segment in one of their seasons of Bullsh*t trying to make the BSA out as some Mormon conspiracy. That they’d somehow been taken over by the LDS and converted into some fundamentalist Christian orthodoxy. Unfortunately they were wrong and or a bit blinded by their own biases. A belief in a Judeo-Christian God has always been a requirement for the BSA.
There are several sad fact about the Boy Scouts. I have a BSA handbook from the 1950’s and another one from the early 1980’s and I used to have a more current version. They’ve been progressively dumbing down the rank requirements for the last 3 or so generations. All in order to promote retention of the scouts (and to keep their parents paying the dues). The rise of the single parent/broken home also seems to have created problems for the BSA. A couple of scout troops in my area have been in trouble due to members’ vandalism and general thuggish behavior. So much for the scout oath and law. There’s also been an overall de-emphasis on outdoor activities.
Increasingly it seems that the Boy Scouts has become an anachronism of the 20th century. A hold over from a time and place where those things it promotes were looked on with favor and understood at least intuitively as necessary for the promotion of a stable society.
