yknot

Frankly, that's what I hope for most. That some of these larger properties, either HA bases or larger council properties, somehow get converted into federal, state or county parks. One thing no one is talking about regarding a total or partial liquidation is that having that many large acreage properties come on market at around the same time would only lead to fire sale prices. There are only so many entities in the U.S. that would have the financial means or interest to purchase large tracts, many of which are in depressed, inaccessible or less than marketable places. It could lead to fire sales, which also does not benefit claimants. One way I could see the federal government assisting would be to put together a package deal of purchasing a collection of plum BSA properties to add to the national parks system, or for states to do so more locally on a case by case basis. I'd love to hear from some property folks about whether that is a viable possibility. I'm kind of more concerned about making sure some of these really historic properties remain wild and accessible and don't wind up being condo enclaves and golf courses.

I think we need to reboot. BSA was facing a situation that was not survivable: huge multi million dollar payouts on a limited series of lawsuits. When it became obvious BSA was facing not dozens but hundreds of such lawsuits, it sought bankruptcy protection in order to survive. It now appears it may be facing thousands of such cases. Whether it's 8,000 or 80,000 almost doesn't matter. I think the poster who said BSA should assess what it needs to survive and offer everything else was right. This isn't a situation where you survive and get to keep the Ferrari, this is a situation where you survive and get to keep some tires, an axle, and some wood.

Except BSA taking that position is the same rationalization that led to a lot of abuse cases being covered up in the first place. You can't be dispassionate about how the public will view your actions in a situation such as this.

This is the crux of the problem with YPT. There is no real, effective oversight of it. There are still some very gray areas in YPT and local commitments and viewpoints about what it is varies. As was pointed out, the reorganization plan doesn't address any of those aspects and I fear never will because BSA clearly wants this in its rear view mirror. I think it believes it's fixed the problem but it hasn't.

That was me and that was what I meant: A PR war focusing on program benefits in the court of public opinion, not in court with the lawyers. Funny how much your thinking can change in 24 hours though. This is such a negative move I doubt BSA will recover from it. If this is the strategy BSA has adopted in order to try and move forward by summer, it is not going to play well with the media and public. It comes off as arrogant, unrepentant, and inadequate. I think the time where we could have tried to do some image repairing is past. That USA Today article will seem pretty retrained in retrospect as we get further into this. One of the comments about BSA acting like it needed to get back to business as usual was dead on. It's just so tone deaf about the situation and the environment that it is hard to believe

Completely. The kids are the best and the reason we put up with the parents. Glad to hear from you.

Hey! 5thGenTexan! How you doing out there? Haven't seen a post from you in awhile. Worried about you, bud. Post up on something. Hoping things are looking better.

I am not sure what you mean by the pipe part but I think your story shows the tragically complex and long lasting effects of abuse. I have occasionally in the course of trying to recruit scouts encountered immediate, visceral and terse reactions from men about how they would never allow their sons to be involved in scouting. Before the abuse scandals really broke, I would persist and maybe try to talk to their wives because some of them were dads and families who seemed ideally suited for scouting. Now I wonder if some of them may have been victims and no longer persist. This was an interesting article in the wash post if you can open it. Surprisingly, it doesn't talk about scouting much, but it does talk about how pervasive abuse of boys seems to be. So sad. https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/02/22/why-we-dont-talk-about-sexual-violence-against-boys-why-we-should/?arc404=true

Thanks. I thought that but wanted to check because I've always been a little fuzzy on how BSA tracks membership. I had the 1.2 million in my head all year for some reason, so I was worried membership as of today would be worse. I thought we'd be down to 800K due to Covid but it's apparently not that low. So kind of good news to me...

Cynical Scouter, can you clarify something for me? Are these retroactive results, meaning that they reflect the loss of the LDS units last year, or are they a current snapshot of who reregistered in December? Are these current numbers? Thanks.

Hikes where you go out and look for stuff are always good. Bird walk. Tree walk. Indian lore. Fish nets in the stream. I generally would scout the trail out ahead of time to find stuff to point out and sometimes even plant stuff for them to find. I personally think there is too much "indoors" in the program and it makes them fidgety, so I tried hard to get them outside. I can't remember exact years but we did the police department, the fire department, and the public works garage to see the big trucks. Maple sugaring. Farm visits. Double A baseball games. I never had Lions but every rank year we learned something about our rank namesake and I would try to take them somewhere to see some -- tigers at a zoo; wolves at a wolf sanctuary; bears at a wildlife rehab center. Webelos we took them to see real live scouts during troop visits (-"

Well said.

For me it's not so much what BSA should have done, it's that it even happened in the first place. BSA, like the Catholic Church, staked out a higher moral ground where participants expected everyone to be held to exemplary standards. Other youth organizations, like sports or 4-H, exhorted you to enroll your kids but they didn't bleat about religious values or character or morality. Ironically, that lack of moralizing may have protected them to some degree. The church and BSA did and then failed miserably in recognizing how predators would use that to cloak their actions. We were in the kid and personal character and leadership business and we actively promoted that. It's incomprehensible to me that we were so inept at recognizing and dealing effectively with this no matter what the standards were at the time. That, to me, is the indictment of the BSA. How did such predators thrive in our ranks when everything we are supposed to be about should have kept them out?

Paper airplane competitions

Hula hoops, marbles, and marble shooting games. Can keep them distanced and the marbles controlled with the hula hoops.

That was true 20 or 30 years ago but not now. People are generally just pretty depraved in the prison system. I have family who work in corrections and it is a different world today.

That's heartbreaking. I also did not tell my father certain things for similar reasons but thankfully those things that negatively affected me were not of that nature. I recently found out about a couple friends who were younger than me who were abused by an adult we knew and the guilt that I did not see it and help them is overwhelming. I wish such things had not happened to you or to them.

Even decades ago if I told my father someone had tried to mess with me they would have been picking up body parts in three counties. Yes times were different and there was a higher threshold for some things then than there is now but the basic human instinct to snap a child abuser's spine has not changed. Except today things being the way they are we send lawyers to snap them in half. I was not an adult in that time period when most of these cases were alleged to have occurred but I have a very hard time comprehending how it could have been so widespread yet so ignored at worst or so incompetently handled at best.

In my area, the private schools are open and the public schools are mostly online. Parents have migrated their students to private schools, including parochial, in order to have in person schooling.

OK forget about Pope Francis. The Cardinal in my archdiocese hasn't been hiding under a rock. There is plenty for him to talk about that has nothing to do with the abuse scandals.

You are getting hysterical. No one is proposing Mosby talk about abuse. Mosby needs to motivate the troops. Mosby can also talk about all the aspects of scouting that have nothing to do with abuse in a controlled setting. There is nothing to fear. Nothing to stop him. Much to be gained over this silence.

I think you keep misinterpreting what I am saying. I am not advocating putting Mosby on CNN. But plenty of CEOs are able to still get messages across in a controlled setting. I've been in corporations during crises and you can put your CEO in front of an internal lens -- whether that's a camera or in print -- to communicate messages to the troops. Invariably, these messages will be leaked to mainstream press. No hostile questions. It's really not that hard.

You are responding without reading. The war is not against the victims or the attorneys. The fight is countering the non stop onslaught of negative publicity with proactive positive messages, of which BSA has many. Let's take the Catholic Church. Lawsuits have never shut Pope Francis up.

Embattled organizations that survive crises fight for their lives in the court of public opinion. The fear of making things worse is what is paralyzing the leadership. It's going to paralyze itself into nonexistence. If BSA does not start laying some groundwork to counter all the negative publicity, it won't matter what the bankruptcy judge leaves it with.

I don't think ParkMan advocated "war" , that was me. And my use of the word "war" was not aimed at attorneys or victims but as staking out a battlefield in the realm of public opinion. We have ceded too much ground to negative coverage. The program aspect of scouting is a deep mine of positive stories, yet we do almost nothing in a coordinated or institutional way to promote any of it. That's where the war needs to be waged. If we wait until the bankruptcy is final, we will be too late. We will be swamped by another wave of negative publicity -- because there is no good publicity that is going to come out of that -- that we may never recover from. We've got to rethink the way we present the organization.