enough about that damn Boy Scout Jamboree!

So fuck Boy Scouts, they're miserable and awful and I hope the organization burns to the fucking ground (and I even did an Eagle Scout project).

A few days later, when I was on crutches, this kid Aiyut (?) thought it would be funny to rename me "Black and Blue Stallion" so he did, and he accomplished this by grabbing my nipples 2-3 times / day and twisting them until I screamed. This caught on (apparently it's called "toolboxing" and for the rest of the summer my coworkers (all of whom were 2-5 years older than me) would grab me by the front of the shirt and twist so hard that I had a black-and blue chest for +/- 3 months. My nickname by the end of the summer? "Toolbox."

Remy, you are a zen master for putting up with that shit.

There were these two fifteen year old Liberty-Spike mohawked post-punk gothy boy scouts -- Tucker and Tyson -- who were in one of these classes, and they were pretty friendly with me outside of the class. They confessed that they hated camp and didn't care about he merit badge, and would love if I kicked them out. So I figured (get this, great adolescent thinking), that they should do something so offensive, so reprehensible -- this part I left up to them -- that I'd have to kick them out of class. Next day came, and I'm in the middle of class and Tucker and Tyson stand up and start peeing, full view of everybody, off the boardwalk. I start laughing really hard, so do all the kids, and I tell Tucker and Tyson they're "out of class for bad behavior." At that precise moment my supervisor, who HAD been spying on me, leaps out of the woods, pushes me off the edge of the boardwalk into the stagnant piss, to the amusement of my class, stops to laugh, and chases Tucker and Ty around the camp for the better part of 20 minutes, legend has it. Never caught 'em. That night, though, when I was on night patrol, I ran into Tucker and Ty and they gave me my first joint. Then they told me they were gay, and in love with each other, and wanted to make out with each other but didn't wanna get caught. So I told 'em a couple of good places; never saw 'em again.

what is not killing us is making strongness

the organization still sucks though.

two more deaths

the headline on the yahoo frontpage originally read "two"

...About 300 people, most of them Scouts, suffered from dehydration, fatigue and lightheadedness Wednesday — just days after four Scout leaders were killed at the national Jamboree while pitching a tent beneath a power line.

[...]

The more than 40,000 Scouts, volunteers, and leaders attending the event had been standing in the sun about three hours when word came that severe thunderstorms and high winds were forcing the president to postpone his appearance until Thursday. Bush's spokesman said Thursday that the visit would instead happen Sunday, at the Scouts' request.

...While this year's Jamboree has been unusually problematic, past Jamborees have had their share of accidents. In 1997, a 16-year-old Boy Scout from Pennsylvania was killed at the Jamboree when an Army Humvee he was not supposed to be driving flipped over. Three passengers were hurt. And in 2001, lightning strikes caused minor injuries to two Scouts...

Second, Wolcott's reaction to the Jamboree meltdown is like mine but better and more complete-- the whole sorry scenario is so conveniently symbolically perfect it's like something from a Boyle story. The "best" of America's boys, uniforms, bad planning, "unforseen" conditions, vicious heat, people dropping, the imminent arrival of the great leader-- but he never shows up. I hope that those kids end up alright. And the rest of us? Who knows.

I also flat-out refused to do those stupid fucking Citizenship in the Community/Nation/World merit badges. I wanted to camp.

http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:PkP0yB3y8UYJ:www.epinions.com/images/opti/ca/82/pr-Bike_Parts_Accessories-Campagnolo_Record_Ergopower_Speed_Shifter-resized200.jpg

Also probably a million other things that I've blocked out, but I do remember some kid cutting my arm with a knife, all manner of pre-pubescent fuckup sexuality escapades that I managed to pretty much dodge and me blowing up a coleman lantern.

Honest, clean, brave, thrifty, reverent...

I understand and appreciate the comments posted here. But I would share with you my humble opinion on this matter. I beleive the world Scouting movement and the Boy Scouts of America in particlar, represent the finest boy lead youth development program in the world today. The principles set out by Robert Baden-Powell are as relevant today as they ever were.

Even with all the warts....it is still a great program that does a lot of good for millions of kids.

Of course you are free to disagree and that this the great thing about living in a free society. We can respectfully agree to disagree.

YIS!

i don't know how adults manage to do scouts nowadays. i would feel like i was asking to be sued or suspected of pedophilia. no thanks!

I didn't know if this had been posted elsewhere but, um....holy shit @ the Boy Scout 'Perversion Files' document release.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/10/boy-scouts-perversion-files-released-the-secrets-are-out.html

Actual documents here. http://www.kellyclarkattorney.com/files/

"Hey - that's not a basket reed!"

Seriously though, I've read through a lot of these. When I was a scout in the early 90s, there was a leader we suspected of abusing his sons (also scouts), but I never knew how much of our knowledge was just mean speculation and joking among 12-year-olds or what. I looked him up and he wasn't in there. That doesn't mean anything of course. Feel like the amount of abuse that went completely unreported probably far exceeds the ones that were reported (even half-assedly to the BSA, who just sort of sat on them sometimes).

Things I noticed in the documents, here and there:
1.) variations on "do you ever give this information to the police or am I getting into something I should stay out of?"

2.) while some of the reports are unrelentingly specific and frightening, some of the reports are very vague and lacking in detail. one of the reports I read, I was like "oh, they basically kicked this guy out for being a hipster." some of them from what I can tell are only included in the "perversion files" because they were found out to be gay ("is it true that you had sexual encoun ters with men?") and simply including these people in here amounts to an outing, afaict. Also, some of these guys were never reported to the police right? That's part of the big stink? So they've never had a fair trial or been convicted.

3.) city with the most cases in the file looks like Chicago, with 22 cases.

Second Place (TIE!) rochester, ny - 12
Second Place (TIE!)houston, tx - 12
Third Place (TIE!!)kansas city, mo - 11
Third Place (TIE!!)dallas, tx - 11

first thing I did was look up Sacramento. DING DING DING two scoutmasters in 85 who were part of a Sacto NAMBLA RING ffs. When they arrested one of them they found an 8 yo IN HIS APARTMENT.

Christ.

But yeah, to what you said, how's life: it's really the situations where they interviewed the subjects, verified the accusations & then locked the info away that is at issue for me. they knew of the harm, had testimonials of wrongdoing, they remove them from the scouts... & then feel no responsibility to report them
further? And you just know that some of these are by no means isolated.
There was 1 guy in Alaska, had moved through 2 towns and then moved onto Cali under a different name. It's just...ugh.

The Aiken case in Florida is so far the one that has stuck out the most to me - some heartbreaking stuff in there (but I'm still barely through A)

Oh god, you're going through them in order? Yikes.

I can't help it.

I haven't looked myself but I can't say I ever got a sense of that from any of the scouting dens/troops I was involved in over the years from the late seventies to the late eighties. For that reason I think I don't WANT to look. (Should also say my dad was a Scoutmaster for some years -- if he had ever encountered something like that, he wouldn't've rested until it was cleared up. But he like me always assumes the best in people on first blush -- perhaps he was hoodwinked too.)

Well, I'm sure not every troop has had a pederast. I mean, there are like roughly 100,000 troops for a couple million kids (if you count cub scouts).

And that's just 2010 numbers. I'm sure that Boy Scouts was a lot bigger in the 70s and 80s. My troop experienced severe attrition in the early 1990s, but I don't know if that happened for scouting as a whole.

I was a brownie & a girl guide growing up, and I know a lot of friends who went through boy scouts, even kids now doing Eagle Scout work.

I think there is still a great benefit to the organization, and I dont think anyone involved, or with prior involvement or good memories should be ashamed of that.

I have no doubt some families felt they were benefited by this being secret. I have no doubt the boy scouts believed confidentiality was the right approach for the image of the organization and those involved BUT they are part of a community, part of towns cities & states where some of these men, released from scouting moved on to other boys in other organizations & other towns. They had a responsibility to their own community that they, in many cases willfully ignored. And as painful as that is, it needs to be reckoned with.

Somewhere along the line the BSA seems to have tied itself closely to the Morman and Catholic churches in many states and now finds itself all but captive to the agendas of those two religions. Consequently, they've done themselves a lot of damage by adopting policies that are seen as narrow-minded, exclusionary and unwelcoming to a large percentage of the population. Not to mention their badly screwing up how they handled child abusers, which now lowers them still further in public esteem.

Surely, they'll survive this series of botches, but they are shrinking, not growing - and likely to continue to shrink. The BSA top level needs to reverse a whole slew of bad policies if they expect to regain the prestige they've stupidly squandered.