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According to an anonymously leaked preliminary memo the US military will be cutting ties with Scouting America (formerly the Boy Scouts of America). This will reportedly amount to ending logistical and medical support for the annual Jamboree, ending the use of military installations as meeting locations for Scout troops, and possibly ending the practice of conferring rank/pay benefits on Eagle Scouts.
The reasoning given is that "the group once known as the Boy Scouts is no longer a meritocracy and has become an organization designed to "attack boy-friendly spaces"", "for being "genderless" and for promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.", and because "the Scouts have strayed from their mission to "cultivate masculine values."".
I've spoken out before as a defender of the organization, especially against the slimy, "damn you for doing better than anyone else and still feeling bad about your failures" child abuse bullshit. I've pitched it to other adults, specifically citing the fact that the astronaut program used to use Eagle as a tie breaker. I was a Scout myself (I made Life; my troop fell apart over interpersonal conflicts before I even began the push the Eagle, and I never bothered finding a new one). And I was an adult volunteer as a Den Leader.
Key word there: was.
And a large part of that is because the criticisms alluded to in that memo are not wrong... though I don't think it's necessarily the result of "feminizing leftist attacks". I think the problem is much older, much more structural, and more fundamental to the gender war in general.
Let's roll back thirty-odd years. I was one of those kids who loved asking extremely awkward questions. I was smart enough to notice certain things, and too socially stupid to realize why without just blurting it out. On one occasion, I ended up sitting next to my Den Leader in his basement while we did some crafting project.
And, with the innocence of a child, I asked: "Hey, Mr. Den Leader. You're the Den Leader, right?"
He looked down at me with his usual surly, dour mien. "Yeah."
"So, why does your wife do all the work?"
Suffice to say, this did not endear me to him, nor improve his demeanor. Later in life I better understood the elements in play, like "construction worker with chronic back pain". But the point stands that in an organization theoretically inclined towards "cultivating masculine virtues", the first five years were mostly run by women and involved an awful lot of arts and crafts projects.
This dynamic stood out even more as an adult. In the Cub Scout Pack I volunteered for, I was the only male Den Leader. We had a dad serve as Quartermaster, and another who was a nebulous Committee Member. But every other Den Leader, the Treasurer, the Secretary and the Cub Master were all moms.
I don't want this to seem like I'm attacking those women. I was quite grateful to the Cub Master (who was also a Den Leader) in particular. She was a no-nonsense, hard-headed woman... by the standards of morbidly obese women who work in HR. The problem is not that the moms stepped up.
The glaring problem is that the dads didn't.
How the hell is Scouts supposed to foster masculine virtues when there's no men to serve as examples? It's the exact same problem as all the elementary teachers being women.
The second, compounding and reinforcing, problem is the program itself. Here is the actual Cub Scout program, running from Lion to Arrow of Light, roughly K-5th grade. Each of those activities awards a belt loop, and they call them "adventures", which is honestly kind of insulting to adventure. Take a few minutes and peruse a few, if you're unfamiliar. See anything that deserves to be called an adventure?
The overwhelming majority of the program is designed to be (I'm going to be blunt here) bonus social studies classes for the biggest pussies in the grade, with a side dish of "technically counts as a gym class, if we're being generous to the huge pussies".
Oh, and I guess once or twice a year, starting in the back half, they get to shoot the simplest, safest bows or BB guns at targets 10 feet away for 10-15 minutes.
Gosh golly, that sure sounds like something that should be worth a bonus rank in the military, right?
It felt like most of the fun, exciting, interesting, vigorous or masculine things we did were things I brought to the table. Like I had to fight the program to do anything cool. The official program doesn't even call for a single one mile hike until Bear - third grade. I had those boys out and loose on every park and wild area in a 45 minute radius every month. That was the part they enjoyed and cared about. The social studies lessons in between? Boring as fuck. I'm the one who took the initiative to teach them about tracking and dangerous animals and poisonous plants. For an organization that was always styled as teaching literary Native American style woodscraft, the entire program is designed to be completed at a school playground.
The very first meeting that I hosted as a Den Leader, I cut up dozens of slips of paper with the virtues of the Scout Law printed on them, then put them in balloons I blew up. I scattered them all around the meeting room, and handed the boys a 3' wooden dowel with a pin duct taped to it, and told them to "hunt for virtue". And with each one they picked up, we had a quick discussion about what "obedient" or "thrifty" meant. The boys had a blast, and obviously escalated to practicing throwing the "spear", and one boy got a minor scratch on his leg.
None of the parents actually complained, but there were a few comments along the lines of "Huh. Are we allowed to do that?" And the answer is... prooooooobably not? If you read any of those "adventures" above, notice the massive safety disclaimer on each one?
Like @FiveHourMarathon said last week, you have to serve a master. But you can't serve two. If your highest priority is safety, you have to sacrifice fun. If your highest priority is inclusion, you have to sacrifice excellence. And if you insist on making Scouts a place where the weakest, most coddled boy in his cohort feels safe and protected, with his mom as Den Leader to ensure everything is maximally Safe and Supervised, then you're going to drive off most boys who might grow up to be special forces, or an astronaut, or a bronze age king.
AIUI, actual Boy Scouts (grades 6-12) are less coddled, even now. They're more independent, they plan their activities themselves and can choose to focus on actual adventures and range time and such. But I don't know for sure, because my own son begged me to stop with the pussified social studies bullshit before then (there were other, personal reasons involved as well, but when I bring scouts up now, a few years later, all he remembers is the boring bullshit and the too-rare hikes). And it's a moot point, because the Boy Scout Troop that his Cub Scout Pack fed into collapsed, because there was no new kids joining.
The military used to value Scouting because a boy who'd spent 12 years LARPing as special forces in the Boer War presumably had a certain independent-mindedness and a bevy of practical skills that might come in handy in a tight spot. NASA used to value Eagle for the same reason, that it showed a certain level of initiative and decision-making that might serve well when all alone with a small team in the cold depths of space.
These days, as I hear it, the Eagle program has been Goodhearted to hell and back. An Eagle rank is desirable, it helps with college, employment, the military - shit I knew a guy who kept his Eagle cert in his wallet to hand over with his license to get favorable treatment from cops. It's desirable, it's known to be desirable, so of course it's gamed to hell and back. Eagle is supposed to involve an independent project that the scout conceives and executes entirely on their own, with no adult help. But of course there are troops that are functionally "Eagle Mills", where the people signing off on the promotion are themselves coaching the kid into doing the bare minimum to technically qualify. I hear the Mormon troops were particularly bad about this, before they spun off into their own thing.
That ties into other safetyist crap. There's a nearby park that has a bunch of small wooden bridges that were built as Eagle projects. Bridges. Uninspected, built by an unlicensed 17 year old. Can you imagine? It's like something out of an irresponsible comedy show. What if something happened and someone fell three feet into knee-deep water? Who would get sued?! Forget that they've stayed up for 30+ years, and served countless thousands of people, you can't do that stuff anymore. The closest Eagle project that I'm aware of from the last 10 years was a couple of public benches.
I hope they at least talked a municipal building inspector into double-checking the work.
The problem with Scouting is that you definitely can get a great experience out of it, with a ton of valuable learning and practical skills... with the right dads, using common sense to flout the technical rules when needed. And then you get the same rank as the useless pussy who was hand-held through a badge mill.
Don't even get me started on fucking popcorn.
I honestly think, for the money you'd spend, you'd get a better experience just organizing a hiking group out of the youth members at the local gun/archery range. You just have to be willing to tolerate a bit of risk and tell the most timid moms to STFU and deal.
In conclusion, while I think totally cutting ties is kind of petty and stupid, well, so is modern Scouting America.
I'm an Eagle Scout, I worked for the Boy Scouts for a period of time as High Adventure Director for my local council, and I've regularly volunteered since at the council level, though my involvement over the past decade has waned and been more at the direction of others rather than of my own initiative, though I did agree to attend a meeting this Saturday evening to discuss certain things. Complaining about a program compared to what it used to be is only valid if you actually knew what it used to be like. So when you say something like:
For full disclosure I was a Cub Scout and Den Chief as a kid but other than that I had little involvement with Cub Scouts. As a professional, I helped out with program during special winter weekends we hosted but I never did anything beyond that, and I never served on the Cub Committee as a volunteer. But I had a lot of colleagues and friends who were involved heavily in the Cub program, some of whom continue to be involved to this day. This program was completely overhauled in the early 2010s, with changes taking effect in 2015. It is now significantly more masculine, or whatever, than the program it replaced, which was basically a continually tweaked version of what they had been doing since at least the 1950s. I checked the requirements, and yes, Bears need to do a 1-mile hike, and a 3-mile hike is part of the Webelos program. Before that it was zero.
Cub Scouts was deliberately separate from Boy Scouts, intended to be a more family-oriented program. Your parent signs off on the requirements, not someone with the Troop/Pack. The program was thus designed around things you could do at home with your family. Except different families do things differently. Some families just aren't going to go camping, or hiking, or whatever, and while there was always that opportunity at the Den or Pack level, they weren't going to make it part of the requirements. Cub Scout leadership is also more transitory than in Boy Scouts. Parents usually only participate while their kids are there, then cross over to Boy Scouts with them. It's not like with Boy Scouts where you have old Scoutmasters who can't give it up and college kids who hang around as adult leaders. Therefore, the program has to be doable by the kind of person who isn't as dedicated as a typical Boy Scout leader.
The reason for the changes was similar to the reason for the admission of girls, and the same reason that underlies the lion's share of decisions the BSA has made over the past 15 years: Numbers. The problem we had was that there was a lot of interest in the Cub program but crossover rates were in sharp decline. The idea was that if we modeled the Cub requirements as junior versions of the Boy Scout requirements it could ease with the transition. Girls were admitted because, when you're looking to increase numbers, it doesn't help to exclude 50% of the youth population. Even in my program things were liberalized a lot more than I would have expected. National Standards had a list of activities that were prohibited in all circumstances. Some of them were inherently dangerous (exploring abandoned mines) and would never be approved under any circumstances, but others were normal recreational activities that the conservative brass in Iriving thought weren't in the Scout Spirit. Then they not only removed ATV riding from the prohibited list but made it part of the camp program. I don't think I'm terribly conservative when it comes to this, but this kind of thing irritates me more than anything they do with politics. I'd rather see it it turned into a woke DEI paradise than have it degenerate into a third-rate tourist trap where our camp offers paddle boats and miniature golf. Part of the reason I left was that I saw things trending in this direction, and my own program was expected to do things that I wasn't comfortable with and knew I couldn't sell to leaders. But that's another story.
I think this expectations mismatch might be the heart of the problem. I wanted something more rigorous and active and, well, manly. Even as a child I wanted grueling endurance challenges, not a gentle stroll that meets a PBS Kids definition of "being active". My favorite memories are things like winning a fire-building contest, teeth chattering in the wet snow, at the Klondike Derby. Or later on, after some Troop drama left me siding with a small break-away faction we did a "summer camp" that in retrospect was not actually an authorized Scouting event beyond the fact that the dad who took us was our new Scoutmaster. He just had a friend who owned a large expanse of wild property, and we spent two weeks loose and barely supervised on an Appalachian mountainside.
The things I remember fondly and want to recreate for my own kids are the things that were hard. If we're setting the standard to "easily accomplished by basically any family that cares to show up"... what is even the point? Is that sort of lowering of standards actually expanding numbers? Or is that why they're still dropping?
As a note, I don't have any problem with opening the program to girls. My own daughter did it for a while. In any county, there's going to be at least a troop's worthy of hardy, outdoorsy girls, and they deserve something more intensive than selling cookies.
I can find older lists of Boy Scout requirements, but not anything for Cubs. I have to wonder though - is this actually an increase in standards and manliness? That goes against the grain of the BSA changes. Or is this something that was being made a requirement because it used to be an assumed default baseline that didn't even need to be mentioned? If the revamp happened in 2015, that's just a few years after Obama ended the Presidential Physical Fitness Test.
I would like the story, if you don't mind, even if it needs to wait until after the holiday. You seem to have been more involved in this stuff than I was, and I'd appreciate reading your take.
I had a fairly outdoorsy upbringing through the 90s. I built my first fire when I was 5, shot a .22 when I was 8, did archery somewhere in between, and spent a lot of time outside sleeping in a tent. There was no point (in my mind) to joining the Cub Scouts. "Oh those nerds making macaroni pictures for their moms? Pass." So at least for me, that is definitely why I never got involved in scouting.
I think of my childhood as a triptych. In school, I was a nerd and then I came home and reread Redwall books on loop. Then, after a few hours of reading, I went to sports practice for my jock third, where I did football, hockey, basketball, baseball, crew, and year round swim teams. And then, on the weekends, I went to the farm a few towns over where my best friend lived to spend 48 hours as a feral redneck, loose on quads in a few hundred acres of woods with BB guns and slingshots and M80s until we stumbled back at dusk, exhausted and filthy.
That best friend tolerated Scouts for a grand total of 36 hours before he was sick of it, and demanded his parents pick him up from the summer camp. And while that might sound weaksauce, he also bagged his first buck a month after he turned 10, alone with a shotgun in a tree stand on his family property.
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