AwakeEnergyScouter

Welcome, @Jadalexm! Despite the learning curve, it's lovely to pay the organizing forward. Our leaders organized for us, now we organize for our children's generation, passing the scouting torch down from generation to generation. 🙏 I'm only a second generation scout myself, my child is third. What has been your biggest challenge so far?

Yeah, I agree. It could be that this stays the only widely violated rule, but probably not given long enough time. The thing about leading volunteers is that you have little positional authority no matter what the org chart says. You have to lead with vision, purpose, and motivate your decisions well or nothing will happen the way you wanted.

Some places are like that. I talked to one unit and they said this is how they will be handling it. they will now offer two overnighters: one Friday/Saturday overnighter with one leader in charge, and a Saturday/Sunday overnighter with a different leader in charge. Families will have their choice of one or two overnighters. I don't think this rule is going to be actually followed by anyone currently doing two nights in a row without a detailed, well thought out, well-explained rationale. We may all cook up different "legal" schemes but we're effectively not going to stop a key part of the cub scouting program just because someone said so.

This is most of ours. There are very few camping opportunities located closer than that, so we'd be doing to the same two places over and over otherwise. I just proposed one with a 3h one way drive time. Let's just say we're complying with the letter but not the spirit of the rule because of the travel time ROI. All we do on night 1 is set up tents and go to sleep because we just drove several hours after work and school. But this gives us the experience of a whole day already settled into camp. It isn't nights that need counting, it's days actually out in nature.

@cmd @InquisitiveScouter @DuctTape Thanks to all of your ideas, I think we can incorporate practicing map and compass skills throughout the year! The local orienteering club leader is willing to set something up for just us - a nuts and bolts focus on orienting the map kind of exercise. The club also has meets twice a year, to which interested scouts can go to with their parents to use that Florida Orienteering plan ideas during. We will do several hikes of course, during which we can use those topo maps to mark what we see on. And during a campout, we can practice taking a bearing and using landmarks and topo maps. Several chances to practice a little at a time, and most of the time it's of little consequence whether they get it right or not. Just building the experience for the day it clicks. Thank you so much for your ideas 🙇🏼‍♀️🙏

Hi @Brannigan! I'm a Wolf (soon to be Bear) ADL in Texas. My home office may or may not be covered in planning materials for the Bear scouting year. Those kids are going to swim and camp and paddle and orienteer and hike and they're going to like it! At least that's my joyful aspiration 🙇🏼‍♀️🙏🏞️

I didn't really understand this either when I first heard of it. I googled it and found a number of blogs, papers, articles, and videos of Indians from various nations sharing their opinions on this. You can be a digital fly on the wall and listen to what they're saying. I didn't agree with everything I read and heard but that's to be expected. But I understand where they're coming from much better now.

Perhaps this is an opportunity to turn your sadness into some local young dancers' joy, if you have that live connection to a nation and scouts don't care to put the work in. If those materials are anything like the materials for folk dresses, they are very expensive and cost is always a barrier. Those kinds of relationships institutionalize poorly, though. I can't imagine that all OA lodges have an 'invite' to learn more from someone in a local nation willing and able to take the time. You can't mandate what people outside your organization do. And you also can't mandate intentions or interest even for members of the organization. Outside the family, the personal chemistry has to be right for someone who does know old traditions to teach someone who doesn't. The scouts at @InquisitiveScouter's camp did so because he was a fellow scout and so he dropped into an existing bubble of friendly Swedishness without resistance. My husband thinks Swedes are very social, friendly, and talkative because every time he goes there he drops right into an existing warm social atmosphere. (This is, of course, not what foreigners typically say about Sweden.) You need someone to like you enough to include and teach you, and that's on a person-to-person basis, plus people have jobs and families. An organization can't possibly count on that kind of real learning being available.

Oh, this is fantastic! Thank you so much! The question of skill progression is not my forte - I have no background in early childhood education - so having some guidance of what you can expect is so helpful! I will see what we can do with this. I see you can get orienteering kits online and we also have a club in town whose white course we might be able to borrow. Thank you 🙏

My pleasure, @InquisitiveScouter! 3:30 isn't bad! I guess it helps that you must all have been sober 😉 It's too bad that program was cancelled, because culture has to be lived. It's one thing to briefly meet people on holiday or at an international camporee or jamboree, and completely different to live with people from another country in their country. Even as an expat or an immigrant you bring with you a cultural bubble if you and your partner are from the same other place. You also understand your own culture better by comparison. My American husband called me a pagan for ten years before I realized what he was talking about. I thought he was kidding because I don't believe in or worship the old gods. He meant the connection to the wheel of the year. Fish in water! Very cool that you got to get in on the making of the pole, usually it's some historical society doing that bit. Since it's hard to celebrate Midsummer on an individual level (I googled how to make a Midsummer pole and the instructions started "get a 20 m long pole..." 🙄) or even small-scale level (we tried with another half-Swedish family, not enough hands to go around the very provisionary pole to dance well), we just flew back last year so that our child will have danced around the Midsummer pole as a child and bound the flower crown and danced in the ring and sung the traditional songs and all that. They're American since we live here, but if they ever want to move to Europe having had some of these experiences in childhood will help them fit in. We were even able to find a children's workshop on maying (decorating with leaves and flowers) a small pole and then raising it into the foot in the traditional way with the 'scissors', picture attached. We faithfully bake the solstice ritual saffron bread every Yule as well and leave the porridge offering for our house gnome. I did also have a spiritual motive, as that second article mentioned. My lineage pulls heavily on Bön, and I find this very comforting actually. Familiar even though I heard of it as an adult. It's given me some words to express what it is that we do at Midsummer and Yule/Christmas exactly, and why we find it so important that we still do it a thousand years after the Christians started trying to stamp it out. They got rid of a lot of other things, but Yule and Midsummer endure because they are our connection to our land and the nature dralas that live on it. Therefore, they are what makes us Swedish, and that's also why they are a cultural litmus test. That is also why we still teach our children about "the gnomes and trolls" as if they're real even though nobody thinks there's little physical people among the rocks and the trees or that proper mining safety requires offerings to the Lady of the Mountain. We still feel their presence in the samboghakaya, the mind realm of concepts. Drala is a Tibetan word that means 'above' or 'beyond' the enemy, the enemy being anything that weakens our windhorse, our sense of flow. Drala is a way of describing the experience of the non-duality of the physical world, a way of being directly being inspired and uplifted by the wisdom and beauty that we experience through our sense perceptions. Sometimes a stone, a tree, or some other "thing" has an intangible presence that cannot be explained. It might not always be there, or only be there for a short period of time, but we often anthropomorphize it to make it easier to talk about. Those are the dralas, the gnomes and the trolls. Relating to the dralas is relating to yourself, the land, and if they're named dralas also your culture. Especially if you're wearing a folk dress, dancing the traditional dances and singing the traditional songs with a crown made literally out of the reflowering of the Earth on your head. I saw somewhere that someone called BP "chief mystic" of the scout movement, and I totally get that. Both we Swedes and we scouts were forest bathing before anyone ever called it that. You are not separate from the forest; you are completely dependent on it, and it is completely dependent on you (to not ransack or pollute it). Being out there is profoundly soothing and calming. Non-duality is a lot easier to experience in nature. That's why the mountains call... Anyway... kind of a big sidebar to the regalia. If anyone would like to continue with that please feel free.

I'm not that familiar with rules for regalia, so I have what may be a basic question: are there rules (formal or informal) around needing to have a family connection to the place/people the regalia is for? I ask because it reminds me a bit of how folk dress works in the Nordic countries. Each locale has its own and wearing it is a statement of being from the place the folk dress is from. They may not be commercially down, they must be hand-sown and ideally inherited. If you roll up to a Midsummer celebration in a folk dress for a place you have no connection to, you're going to be seen as a liar. It's just not done. Last Midsummer, we went for a very traditional celebration in the area of Sweden that my family is from. It's pretty culturally conservative, to the point where one particular valley was still writing with runes in the 1800s. Since I have my grandmother's folk dress from the town we're from, I had a number of people in the local folk dress come and ask where it's from. Make no mistake, this was a "are you one of us" question, because it's from the same region as opposed to all the city slicker tourists coming there just for Midsummer. (I did not mention that we flew in from abroad!) Had I said "I bought this on the Internet because I thought it looked cool", that would have been highly frowned upon. They way you make a high-quality folk dress takes a lot of passed-down knowledge... In my grandmother's case, a lot of sewing, embroidery, and weaving classes. Can't imagine it's easy to make regalia either. That's what makes me wonder how you get high-quality regalia without a living connection to the tradition they come from.

I may or may not have been able to convince my husband to let our child join scouts without observation. He was very opposed in large part because he had a bad experience (ordinary bad experience, not abuse) in cub scouts himself. He's still opposed, but what made it possible to join without causing a family rift was that I could be there for literally everything. I am trying to get him to come to more scout things to convince him further that our pack takes youth safety seriously and does follow the scout law.

It's a difficult calculus for parents for sure. After all, the absolute vast majority of kids weren't sexually abused, but it's so horrific that it can be hard to take the gamble for your own child. I mean, it's so hard to even think about because it's so uncomfortable and angering. No statistics are going to calm that feeling of parental fury. One of the things that struck me when we sold popcorn for the first time this past fall was how many old scout's faces softened when they saw us and expressed surprise and gratitude for that cub scouts still exists. One said outright that he loved scouting but was made to leave by his mom after... and then he realized there's a child present and said something like "the events". I'm glad that you got to join after all, and that (presumably) nothing happened to you.

I thought about this. This exact point is the painful point, isn't it? I don't think anyone ever thought about whether you could trust the scout leaders when I was a scout. If my parents had concerns, I never picked up on it. But my parents didn't have an abuse scandal to think about. How do you thread this trust needle? There's no nice quick answer. One possible help that I don't think I've seen mentioned is leaning into building an organizational culture in which the youth feel unconditionally heard when they voice concerns. You never know how you're going to react if it happens to you, and freezing is very common, but afterwards telling another scout can be an additional avenue support. The friend can't be responsible for dealing with it of course, but might be in a better state of mind to remind the victim to tell a trusted adult etc to make sure the larger world finds out and can take action. I never felt alone with a scout leader because there were lots of us scouts around. Perhaps I was naive, but that was my perception. I have spent a fair bit of mental energy trying to figure out whether unwanted touch is objectively sexual enough to ask someone to stop. I've now realized that it doesn't matter; one is also perfectly within one's rights to decline non-sexual touch as well. Nobody has a right to touch you against your will regardless of whether it's sexual or not. This could be an idea we could reflect more actively as we go about our activities. It could save kids from having to sort ok touch from abusive touch on very little life experience. We could also talk about how to support a friend who's been harassed, assaulted, or abused. When a friend told me she was gangraped I didn't really know how I could help best. I tried to tell her she shouldn't be ashamed, but she was, so much so that she didn't want to report like so many others. I wasn't able to give her the mental giant hug that I wanted to, and the perpetrators of course remain unpunished. No idea how to make that age-appropriate but somebody out there knows. Trust still rebuilds slowly, but actually being trustworthy in the first place is the foundation for it ever succeeding. For the new parents - perhaps getting to know the leaders at an adults-only meeting specifically to address the trust issue?

If there is no consensus, then it seems that the only way to show kindness and compassion for the whole painful situation is to steer clear of incorporating all Indian heritage. It might be more than necessary, but it is clear. And it might well be necessary. Either way, it seems like a situation where the action needed is clear without the details of the situation having to be. If we are kind, then we don't twist an old dagger that's still in a wound.

"The Spanish Inquisition would never have worked with the Church of England" (from Eddie Izzard's bit Dress to Kill) Thank you for flying Church of England, cake or death?

Yes, one could take the narrow view that the resolution talks about schools and OA isn't a school so it doesn't apply, but that doesn't seem to be in the spirit of being friendly, courteous, kind, brave, and reverent. Shouldn't we reach out to the Lenni-Lenape government to confirm? If they do indeed say "please stop guys", then... I think we are bound by our own values to do so, and muster the energy to meet that emotional difficulty with bravery and cheerfulness.

It makes perfect sense to me that BP wouldn't have meant the Christian God exclusively and/or hyperspecifically, at least not for long, given the general context of the times and his life's work and speeches. It's also kind of how I intuitively interpreted all the miscellaneous mentions of God in old songs and such as a child, including for example the Swedish Scout Song. "(Till Gud, kung och fosterland...") Just like singing that line is not an oath of personal fealty to the current king, having a duty to God isn't so tightly or literally defined in practice. The phrase is historical but is pointing at something more universal, like you say. The vagueness is actually an advantage IMO - you have to really think about it. That makes the end result really yours. I checked on my perception that God with a capital G refers specifically to the Christian God as opposed to god without one meaning any and/or an unspecified god, and while at least some online sources seem to share this division it still doesn't make sense to use that to say BP was only talking the Christian God or at widest the Abrahamic God. (The top hit was https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/God) I will, however, not invite the Jehovah's Witnesses in to ask, although I have to admit I'm curious about not just that but that I guess they don't see themselves as Christian? I have all kinds of questions about them I will take to my grave. One shouldn't take the phrasing "duty to God" too seriously in my personal opinion, but it's evident that it has caused confusion all the same. I and most other Europeans also have the luxury of no longer needing to worry about losing our rights and freedoms because of the Church, so it's easy to give a generous, inclusive reading when you have nothing to fear. I might not have felt the same when I would have faced torture for not believing in the Christian God, and I am definitely more sensitive to it in the US. But be that as it may, the wind in the scouting movement's sail is the power behind discovering how those universal human values feel when you proclaim them and live by them. 🙇🏼‍♀️🙏

This is an interesting take, but I'm not sure that this is generally how the words 'morals' and 'ethics' are used. I checked my own understanding, and it seems that while your argument is coherent from its own definitions, 'morals' is commonly used without any implication of being commanded or of a godhead and 'ethics' is actually the more universal synonym of the two according to Merriam-Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/moral Sīla, for example, is often translated 'morality'. (https://www.britannica.com/topic/sila-Buddhism) But I imagine this didn't come out of nowhere. Is this usage of morals and ethics common in your social circles? May you be well 🙏

How wonderful. 🙏

The reason I asked for clarification is that this is a topic for which precision in word usage is very important, and also because I am unaware of any recent movement to remove spirituality from scouting. In other words, I'm not entirely sure what you see from your POV. You see a change of some kind but I want to be sure I understand what you're talking about. If by religious you mean any and all forms of organized and unorganized personally held spirituality, then I have never heard such a pitch to make scouting un-religious and need some catch-up. If by religious you mean theist, then there is no new movement, it's been un-religious almost since the beginning. The originator of scouting, BP, explicitly conceived of scouting as not being a Christian thing, and was the one to direct the movement in a explicitly unreligious direction once scouting spread outside traditionally Christian countries. The Boys' Brigade was the explicitly Christian alternative and is also still around, but never took off like the scouting movement exactly because it's not nearly as inclusive and therefore not inspiring. BP invited nontheists to practice at Gilwell Park, nontheists formed unreligious NSOs merely a few years after the founding of the movement, and more locally nontheists have been part of BSA for almost it's entire history. If your definition of atheist overlaps with nontheist, then the above is already true of atheists. Theism isn't the only form of spirituality, and the WOSM constitution defines Duty to God without reference to theism exactly to clarify this point. If by religious you mean formally belonging to a well-recognized religion only - then I think it is in keeping with scouting spirit to not start drilling prospective scouts on whether they're religious enough to join. I think we let whoever wants to join do so and stay out of policing people's spiritual beliefs. Being out in nature is a way to experience the sparkle for oneself, regardless of whether one sees it coming in. Further, the WOSM constitution uses spirituality, not religion, for the red thread that runs through scouting, although this is more recent so perhaps this is the change that you see? I do think that BSA should drop the religious declaration. I do not see why one needs to solemnly swear that one is spiritual but not kind or clean, for example, and this kind of entrance requirement feels like some purity or goodness test - entirely contrary to the inclusive and warm spirit of the movement. But what I'm really trying to do here is to strengthen the scouting spirit of that all are welcome. ♥️ We (the scouting movement) are so strong because we stand for universal values. We will only weaken with excluding this group and that group. We are all needed to build a better world. During the work of doing so, even strict materialists have the opportunity to notice the sparkle ✨

Quick clarification question - what do you mean by "un-religious" here? We may be talking about different things.

What interesting responses. I wasn't sure if I had perceived clearly, but it seems I had. Now I really understand some comments I've heard in our pack. Thank you to all who answered. This was tremendously illuminating for me. Going back to the previous question of whether scouting and/or Scouts BSA is built on a Christian or at least a theist foundation without which the scouting method will turn into chaos, then; the conversation has conflated the scouting movement with BSA. If BSA isn't necessarily a part of the official scouting movement in people's minds, then there are two cases. My answers are only for the case of the BSA being part of the scout movement (together with GSUSA but not the other non-aligned scout-like organizations) that has two worldwide governing bodies that co-lead the movement. So, for this case, my argument is that since nontheist scouting has been done for literally decades by many millions of scouts in many NSOs already, the empirical answer is in: no chaos, has never been, will never be. We're nothing if not cheerfully organized! The national Scout Laws and Promises aren't identical but reflect a core ethic that binds the movement together into a coherent entity with unity in diversity, and theism is part of what's optional. The unity remains without it. Question empirically answered. Now, if BSA is a Christian/theist organization and is merely inspired by the scouting movement at this point, then I can see the argument that there will be chaos in a Christian/theist organization if you remove the Christianity/Gods and that other similar organizations may or may not be good examples to follow. That I have no comment on other than to note that since requiring being of a specific religion(s) is contrary to scouting's core values, to me that case falls outside discussion about scouting. I'm not actually that interested in this case. People can start whatever scouting-like organizations they want, it's a solid movement to copy, but it's not scouting and scouting is what I'm interested in. This might be more of a heart issue for those who scouted in the BSA, I suspect.

Are you saying that the BSA and most members thereof see themselves as their own, separate scouting-like movement that shouldn't align with any other scouting-like organization?

That's true, the charter organization thing isn't done everywhere. I don't know what the influence of the YMCA was, but assuming in this context that it was an explicitly pro-Christian influence. I'm not quite sure I understand how these differences make comparing BSA scouting to other aligned NSOs invalid or unhelpful, though. Would you be willing to explain?