What are the Girl Scouts exactly? Like Boy Scouts, they wear uniforms; and not Catholic school uniforms, or sports team uniforms, but military uniforms, of colors made to camouflage a wearer in nature. We know Baden-Powell was about well-behaved boys, kept off the street, appreciating conservationism. Did he have to dress them like soldiers?
Couldn’t girl scouts, for example, dress like girls? Probably the images of Hilter Youth would not be so stigmatized if they hadn’t looked like uniformed Nazis in training.
Republican Youth Scouts of today seem to be about the same unquestioning patriotism: duty, honor, ratting on their parents, and dressing like Fascists. In a not unrelated exploitation of youth, Girl Scouts are made to peddle cookies of a quality Keeblers wouldn’t feed a pet hobbit, hyped by the urban-mythical Thin Mints, surely viral marketing if ever there was a poor cookie
Since Scouting For Boys was a manual for training young boys to be Scouts, the most dangerous job in the Army at that time…
He was appalled at the huge number of casualties of 12 and 13 year old boys from the British Army hiring them to be Scouts, drummers and pipers, (Kid, your job is to stand there, in the open, where anybody can shoot you, and make a lot of fuckin’ noise…and you’ll be the last group to wear the red uniform with the white X over your vital organs too) that, instead of actually, you know, joining the Liberal Reformers, those sissies who feel that Children Should Not Be Killed, you know the ones…
He simply started a program called Boy Scouts which taught the kiddoes how to be very underaged soldiers without getting their collective ass shot off quite as often.
Now, before the Right Wing Trolls start screaming that I’m wrong and must be Anti-American or some such bullshit, that “propaganda” is straight from the book “Scouting, For Boys” and was required reading when I was in the Scouts.
You want further evidence, you say?
Here’s one: the Boy Scouts (and military PREDATORS errr I mean Recruiters who cruise Middle School campuses looking for VICTIMS ummm “Future Recruiting prospects) are the reason cited for the United States veto of the Children’s Rights resolution in the Security Council of the U.N., a resolution which passed almost unanimously in the General Council… with the United States representative, Shirley Temple, voting “No”.
Yep, the United States Republican Party gave Shirley Temple Black, former child star, the order to sabotage any enforceable portion of the recognition of the fact that children are human and deserve certain human rights… like not being used as prostitutes, or beaten, or sold as slaves…
or used as soldiers. We need a picture of her as the Child Confederate Officer from when she was 6 years old to post. IF the movie studio that owns it (might be Fox) were to permit it.
And Scouting isn’t an American invention either— it’s British.
And comes from the same time when there was actually a debate over whether or not Children under the age of ten could be hanged.
Why should that even be a subject of Debate?
There’s a Travel Channel show in re-runs, “Haunted London”, one of the ghosts at the Old Bailey courthouse and jail is an 8 year old girl who was hanged in 1911 for shoplifting.
Mary Poppins my ass…
Whoa…..I DO have to say something in defense of the girl scouts, albeit the roots of the organization are certainly very scary…they hardly represent what it is now. As a former Brownie and Girl Scout, I LOVED my little, progressive for the late 50’s and early 60’s, troop. And not until my interest in boys took hold, did I give it up.
I can’t relate how many eye-opening, interesting and giving opportunities they provided me. A love of the outdoors, an education of the environment, camping, learning skills for survival in nature and life…..many skills during that period of time that were previously only taught little boys.
I was fortunate, probably more than most, to have progressive thinking leaders and role models.
Cookies were a way to help fund our summer camps and to help send our buddies who couldn’t afford to go to camp. Our troop raised enough money to take along 3 little girls in our troop to camp whose families would not have been able to come up with the funds. We loved camp! It was great fun and a wonderful experience…sleeping under the stars, learning to get along with others, earning my Red Cross Lifesaving card, singing around the campfire and telling scary stories in our tents at night, being homesick and waiting for that care package from home. All wonderful memories and I wouldn’t trade them for the world.
I forgot to mention that we hated the dreaded uniforms, but loved our little sashes with our merit badges and pins on them showing our accomplishments. I’ve noted from the little scouts I’ve seen over the last years that the uniforms have definitely changed for the better or are worn in pieces and parts. I always thought they were unnecessary and regimental.
I have some warm memories of Vacation Bible School, too, though I never was a girl scout. The Southern Baptists sure cooked up some good fried chicken.
I can’t remember if my nieces were referring to the Awannas uniform or the Brownie uniform when they call it an “acorn suit” because that’s what it looks like with the tan uniform and the brown beret on top…
It’s not like you don’t learn a few interesting things in scouting.
The ones they failed to teach me were stuff like Rank Consciousness…
one of my childhood memories, I was barely in Kindergarten and my two sisters were Brownies (no, I must have been first grade because Brownies are 7 & 8 year olds) and they sang a Communist anthem for an assembly.
“This land is your land” by Woodie Guthrie…
I didn’t know it at the time nor, I’m sure, did their scoutleader.
The stanza “as I was walking that ribbon of highway” it sounded for all the world like they were saying “I saw a bunny” and I wondered what the hell a rabbit had to to with anything.
One thing that scouting does for you, though, is it makes the disillusionment come crashing in on you once you find out you’ve been told some whopping big stories.
Disillusionment is a terrible thing to go through, but, they lay on some pretty thick helpings of bullshit and especially in Scouting.
So it’s an almost inevitable part of American culture.
I think, truly, that people who spout the shit even after they grow up, are doing it in an attempt to make the badness go away from their thoughts.
Kind of an arrogant projection used as a security blanket.
…that’s why we get your Ray Gunn and Bush in the presidency… People who didn’t even have to go all the way to Egypt to swim in De Nile.
For anyone interesting in an alternative scouting program, check out the Spiral Scouts. We’ve just started up a circle here in Colorado Springs. My friend Mike and I are the co-leaders. I believe in the ideals of scouting: respect, responsibility, traditions, rites-of-passage, ritual, earning badges, community service, campfire songs, etc….
Spiral Scouts has all that without the bullshit. And we have really cool uniforms! 🙂
I love people who, rather than bitch, actually do something to make things better. Yay for you and Mike!
suesun….yea! That is a coool thing.
And a thought occurred to me last night….you’re not going to like this……
Our lime green peace t-shirts could be considered regimental, as well.
The uniform of the peacenik. Argh….
Maybe if we added flowers in our hair, it might be a flashier uniform? Wasn’t there an inflated Marine balloon at the St Pat’s Day Parade? Next year, the J$P might want to think about getting an inflated Hippie balloon for its contingent? And an inflated Gandhi one, too, would be nice.
It looks as though Diann is right. Look at the peace sign carried at the March 15th World Against War demonstration in the UK.
Actually, Green is a great color to associate with PEACE advocacy since war making is the greatest contaminate to the environment possible. Better GREEN than RED, since RED is associated with both blood and Stalinist ‘communism’, 2 negatives. And the PEACE SYMBOL is, like it or not?, actually an international counter symbol to the rabid militaristic nationalism now associated with the US flag.
Now, how about those inflatable balloon suggestions, Eric? Can’t we have at least one inflatable PEACE HIPPY made up for us PEACENICs? (Actually, since I got a job I might not be a hippy any more, am I?) Besides, hippies should be stoned, and not ‘contrarian’ and ‘divisive’. PEACE, Man. Like RAINBOW, Dude. Have some ice cream… Yeah, we got a uniform already.
I just found out, on another board, that certain shall we say “unenlightened” individuals are waging war against the Cookie Sale in particular and Scouting in general, but with the truly backward argument that Scouting is a United Way organization.
These would be the freaks who think giving money to the MS Association or to Jerry’s Kids is amoral because they’re in the same fundraising umbrella as Planned Parenthood.
I wonders, yes I does, if our own Dear Bishop Sheridan is in that action.
Scouts? A place to learn where Merit Badgers sew their medals.
Hippies? A sweeping stereotypical chant – great for banging doves against the pavement to.
Best modeling for kids? The play-dough factory is open 24/7, right next to Monopoly. Pygmalion loves his shape sets. I’m about to advocate kilt and bagpipes – but only for clear markers of clanned goods.
(…and to Jonah – great memory on This Land is Your Land. We sang it too, as well as “If I had a station wagon I’d drive to Colorado”. Such bad advertising… it worked. The wagons have not only circled, they’ve spiraled!)
Yeah, but they made the fatal mistake of letting US in… with our knowledge of their system and methodology firmly in our minds…
Bwaaa-haaa-haaa-haaa!!!!
Hi all,
I know this post is kinda old, but I just now came across it. I had to reply because at first I thought it was a joke. My thoughts are along the same lines as Diann’s above.
I was in the Boy Scouts for about seven years, and earned the rank of Eagle Scout, and from personal experience I have to say that this post is incredibly overblown.
Uniforms and an emphasis on traditional values do not make the Scouts a bunch of proto-fascists. I never found it militaristic, fascistic, whatever, at all.
What people don’t realize is that a good deal of the kids who do Scouts are pimply fat kids whose parents make them do it to so they’ll get off the video games and out in the woods. It does teach them “respect, responsibility, traditions, rites-of-passage, ritual, earning badges, community service, campfire songs,” as suesun puts it. It certainly taught me a lot of great things, and I made a lot of friends. Neither I nor any of my fellow Scouts were jackbooted thugs, to the best of my knowledge.
Oh yeah, and Girl Scout cookies are *delicious.* Samoas are disgusting, I’ll grant you that, but most of them are addictively good.
Yeah, Eric, what’s with attacking these cookies?