David CO

Gee whiz. NJCubScouter has something "law related" in his background, but that has never caused us to exclude him.

As a former school Athletic Director, I have had a few incidents which resulted in a parent being banned from school grounds. Since the kids were not directly involved in the incidents, they were allowed to continue their participation in the activities. I have never banned a parent for being a general pain in the neck. It has always been for a specific and identifiable act. It seems to me if you have an "open forum" at your meetings, then you must accept the fact that somebody might express unpopular opinions. If the parent is actually posing as a registered leader, the best response is to calmly state that the parent is not a registered scout leader and has no authority to speak for the unit or the Chartered Organization.

Scouting is a multi-layered activity. Some of it is done as an individual scout. Some of it is done as a patrol. Some of it is done as a troop. I see no useful purpose in elevating one part of scouting and diminishing the others. I see the troop as the basic unit of scouting because that is where the ownership, rechartering, registering, and record keeping takes place. I don't think this diminishes either the individual efforts of the scouts or the group activities of the patrols. I didn't know that BSA once registered patrols. That's interesting. Yes, I can easily see how a scout who was registered in a patrol might have considered the patrol to be the basic unit of scouting, but BSA doesn't do that anymore. BSA does still register Lone Scouts. When I was a Lone Scout, I saw the individual scout as the basic unit of scouting.

That's how I meant it.

Are you indicating a moderator bias here? Since we have no forum for Troop Method, I would have preferred that it be left where it was.

A Lone Scout has neither a troop nor a patrol.

Yes, I remember that. You were misquoting me then, much like the way you are misquoting me now. You seem to make a habit of it.

That was quite a rant. I don't mind the rant, but I really wish you wouldn't put words into my mouth.

No, the troop does not exist for the administrative convenience of the patrols. The troop exists because a Chartered Organization generously chose to offer a scouting program to its boys. The CO owns the troop. From the way you talk, one might suppose that a group of patrols get together and decided to charter a troop for their mutual administrative convenience. You completely ignore the Chartered Organization. Those who seek to minimize the role of the troop are also out to diminish the important role of the Chartered Organization which owns the troop. I don't agree with that.

I disagree with you. Boys join a troop, which is subdivided into patrols.

I think it is time to rethink giving BSA an exclusive charter. There is no good reason why we shouldn't have more than one scout association in the U.S.. A little competition could be a good thing. It might make the execs think twice before making radical changes if scouts could switch associations like they can transfer to different units.

What I find most interesting is that you had to go outside of this forum to quote someone who said that women are less intelligent than men. You never heard that sort of thing from us. Your comment about the alumni of an all-boys school makes me think you might have an agenda against all single-gender groups, and not just the Boy Scouts.

The new merged councils are tending to choose names that don't clearly identify where the scouts are from. They are getting nondescript council names like Path to Adventure and Three Rivers. I think we should just lose the shoulder patch. It serves no useful purpose.

Actually, people living in the roaring twenties dealt with many of the same issues we are talking about now. Since B-P didn't embrace these values during the era of "Anything Goes", I have no reason to believe he would do so today.

I wear as little ornamentation on my uniform as the rules allow. I am not at all impressed by bling. I also think it is a terrible idea to have a uniform patch signifying a donation. That is in very bad taste.

Yes, the Owasippe Scout Reservation was saved. Owasippe Staff Association and Owasippe Outdoor Education Center members were big winners in this negotiated slate. I find it somewhat ironic that the CO's ended up losing some of their voting strength in the council when the members-at-large were "greatly expanded". This was a poor reward for stepping up and supporting the opposition. I have mixed feeling about the results. I'm glad that Owasippe was saved, but I am disappointed that opposition leaders double-crossed the CO's in the negotiations. The CO's never got the free and fair elections they were promised. My unit has never gone back to Owasippe. Since the membership changes, we have only used church owned campgrounds.

That is nonsense. National refused to allow the CO's to vote on and elect a board of their own choosing. They kept putting up a slate of candidates who were totally unacceptable to the CO's. What was true then is still true today. The execs still have all the power, and there are no free and fair elections in BSA. All of these recent changes have been done without the votes or the approval of the CO's. It is totally on the execs.

It is always a unanimous vote. In a system where people are freely and fairly elected, you don't get a unanimous vote on such a controversial issue.

No, that's not how it works. The CO's cannot put someone they like up for the Executive Board. It is not like a regular election where anyone can be nominated to run. The execs appoint a nominating committee, which creates a slate of candidates. The COR's have a yes or no vote to accept or reject the slate. The COR's cannot nominate an opposing candidate from the floor. If they reject the slate, they will be in big trouble with national. The COR's in Chicago actually did show up in force one time. After they rejected the hand picked slate, the execs at national threatened to pull the council charter. National eventually got their slate passed. National picks the slate at every level of scouting except the local unit. I support the local unit.

Business as usual. I heard the rumors, but I wasn't contacted.

I wasn't.

But you do know that the majority of CO's were opposed to the recent changes, don't you? If the CO's in BSA have so much power, then why did the execs feel so free to ignore them? Is that on topic?

Absolutely untrue. The CO's have zero power in BSA. The execs have all the power. The COR's don't show up at council because they all know that it is a sham. It is a waste of their time. They have no real vote or real authority in council decisions. The only way to drain the swamp is to deny them our money. Unfortunately, the execs are a bit like the conquering machines in The Matrix. If you block off their sunlight, they might just decide to use you as a battery.

Of course there is. I like just about everything we do at the unit level. That's why I participate. I just wish we could drain that corrupt fetid swamp we call "national". There is absolutely nothing about BSA, above the unit level, that I like. I don't want to give them a nickel. I do feel like every dollar we send to council/national is extortion money. I would rather burn it than see them get it. There is a great scene from The Quiet Man when John Wayne tosses the dowry money into the fire. I wish we could get away with doing that at recharter time, and toss the money into a campfire as an gesture of our disdain.

This is basically the same argument that is used by cowardly dictators who use innocent civilians, mostly women and children, as human shields to protect themselves and their military assets from attack.