It seems the Boy Scouts, motto be damned, just aren't all that prepared to blaze their well-marked trails into the forest of the late twentieth century. But amidst all the politics and posturing, there's an important question that remains unanswered: why do these lads want to be scouts anyway, when the Boy Scouts are so clearly under the firm leadership of a bunch of bigoted morons?
I'd like to tell these young crusaders that my fifteen minutes as a boy scout were no great shakes. I was inducted into the inner sanctum of scouting at an after-hours firehouse one summery evening in the green hills of my home state. I'd spent years in the blue and yellow purgatory of cub scouting, in anticipation of that day. I'd drank the warm watered-down Tang at the cub scout leader's house, ate the crumbly Hydrox cookies she foisted on us, learned the requisite knots, built the obligatory pinewood racer, and pasted together the necessary diorama of Indian life on the Great Plains. I was itching to upgrade that demeaning two-finger salute for a proper three-finger Boy Scout one.
I was dying to get out of my knee-patched blue cub scout duds and into that brown suit. In anticipation of the ceremony, I learned the Boy Scout oath and creed and all the other associated meaningless in-group lexicon shared by members of a consensual status hierarchy.
Our new scout master was the father of one of my fellow cub scouts. All you need to know about this young man was that his last name rhymed with "snot." At the age of 13, it doesn't take much more than that to destroy your chances at being a popular person. We hated him with the unfettered and limitless cruelty found almost exclusively in children. And so, after we took our oaths as new boy scouts, it seemed perfectly obvious that the best way to celebrate was to run around the back of the firehouse and beat up the scout master's son.
In retrospect, I can see it was a lapse in good judgement, but at the time we were drunk on our new-found power. The scout master saw it differently, and there was an ugly scene in which the furious father crammed himself into a tiny bathroom with the terrifically-fat young man who was our de facto leader, and yelled at him for twenty minutes without inhaling. We were sent home in disgrace. Our pack dissolved, and our troop number was probably expunged from the annals of Boy Scouthood. Other than the few moments in which we beat up the scout master's kid behind the firehouse, I'd just as soon forget my whole experience as a boy scout.
Why would anyone put themselves through so much trouble for that? Before you boy scouts start beating wood fibers to make paper on which to send me nasty letters, let me say that I recognize that many of you learned important skills, like building a fire, or calling up your fellow Eagle Scout twenty years later to inquire about opportunities in his brokerage and investment firm. Don't think I don't know what all the fuss is about. I learned how to make fires, too; I just found out how brightly and quickly those flames spread when it's bridges burning in the darkness behind you.