Mt Whitney Zone Forums General Discussion Boy Scouts, outdoors, and danger

As one who has never been involved in scouting, and so has no axe to grind (nor interest in grinding one) either way, perhaps you will allow me to be a brief voice of reason here before moving on with this dialog.

DUG - It sounds like you need to introduce to RP some of the folks you know who have some positive scouting stories to tell so his opinion can be more fully balanced between those he's met so far and those he has yet to meet.

Ken - Perhaps scouting is going through a particularly soul-searching or rebuilding time at the moment compared to past decades; but I doubt your words were meant to brand the entire organization (and by that, I don't mean just its administration) as corrupt or without merit.


In general, for any organization -- and that includes us here at WZ -- each individual is the "face" of the organization they represent (whether knowingly or not). This is why college football athletes sometimes get booted off the team (or even out of school) for doing things that reflect badly on the school. It's also why we remove offensive posts on the rare occasion they get posted here, so that we also put on a good "face" in representing our Whitney family to the outside world and to newcomers. It's a reputation we've worked to achieve and continue to work at maintaining. But I digress....

So like any other organization, I'm sure BSA has those in its ranks who, for whatever reason, aren't putting on a very good "face" for BSA and are thus, unfortunately, making a bad name for BSA when that happens. However, I don't doubt that it's equally true that there are those in that organization who go out of their way to represent it honorably and responsibly in every way possible. I would guess that DUG and SoCalGirl are two such people. In a diverse group such as ours, I'll bet there are others. No doubt they can both tell us stories from either side of the good face/bad face equation.

In the long run, the greater organization at the national level will probably prosper (or not) depending on how they handle those who don't represent them well. Not being in scouting myself, I can only surmise from what I've heard here that it sounds like there might be some "squeaks" that need "oiling" even though, at the same time, things are running just fine elsewhere in the organization.

Just my observations.

CaT