Here’s a Heavy One:

Once upon a time a bunch of guys decided it would be a good idea to hack up 300+ men, women and children (including infants) with machetes.

Wait.  That is so depressing.  Let me start over.  Once upon a time I was a boy scout.  Basically, I looked like these guys.

You looked, didn’t you?  It’s ok.  Chuckle at my expense.  Maybe it will take your mind off the Nigerians.  Now, frankly, I didn’t like being a boy scout.  There were a lot of reasons for this that I won’t get into because that would involve naming names and generally being unnecessarily rude.  Hey, some of the people involved are probably still alive.

The clincher, the thing that made me quit scouts, was being coerced into going to the Boy Scout Jamboree with a broken arm in temperatures that exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade.  (Side note: I broke my arm while swinging from the rafters of a pole barn in western Minnesota.  My grandfather told me to get down from there or I’d break my arm.  I didn’t listen to him.)

So at the Jamboree, I slept in a corn field on corn stubble.

There were a lot of spiders.  I wrapped my cast in a plastic sack to protect it from the water while I went canoeing.  I did not have a good time.

Near the searing wasteland where we had pitched our tents, there were some kind of water treatment tanks that kids were dipping their arms into because it was so damn hot.  We were going to take any relief we could get.  The bullies scout leaders said the next kid that dipped their arm was getting put on a bus and sent home.  I dipped my arm immediately (not the one with the cast) but the bastards scout leaders didn’t make good on their promise.  I had to suck it up and survive the duration of the entire jamboree.

Did it build character?  I dunno.  I cried a whole lot and wrote a letter to my mom.

Scouting: I’m not a fan.  But you know, they have a good motto.  Nothing objectionable about “Be Prepared!”

The scout oath is actually fairly well rounded too, outlining various duties to country, other people and self.

Now, my favorite part of the oath is where it says, “To help other people at all times.”  That’s nice.  I mean it sounds good.  Genuinely.

Like, is that really so hard to do?  Help other people at all times?  Apparently as a matter of fact — what if Bernie Madoff (yeah he is a former boy scout) had taken that part of the oath seriously?

Shifting back on topic a bit, you know how I ramble in my blogs: a friend of mine who’s an atheist pointed out that the violence in Nigeria was probably either political or sectarian.  Unfortunately he was right.  It was sectarian.  Which probably made him feel like he’d gotten a gold star on his paper: the one that explains why his decision to be an atheist is the right one.  Silly religious people anyway…

Yes it’s another tangent to ask what’s more ludicrous: hoping five billion people will stop believing in God (I think that’s a Cambridge University study from 2005 but I could be wrong) or hoping that religious folks can find a way to be tolerant and work for the collective good of humankind?

Both do sound pretty unrealistic, don’t they?  Move over to the House and Senate.  Not much better odds.  Even these guys that claim to be patriots can’t find a way to work for the common good of the country.  It’s about getting re-elected.  It’s about lobbyists.  It’s about pride.  I don’t feel like they are helping me.

I feel like people in general, political or not, religious or not are focused on differences, on what makes us unique, different, special…on what makes us an individual, to the point that I think we’ve lost track of the fact that we are cut from the same whole cloth.  Who walks into a village with a machete and thinks it’s ok to kill people for being different?

Now I figured boy scouts was a relatively safe organization to use as a benchmark because it isn’t a religion.  They’re just some chubby kids.  And thin kids.  Black kids and white kids etcetera.  All of them wearing the same dorky brown uniform.  But you know what?  Even at eleven, they’ve got it right — if they can hold onto the ideals: Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful…Brave.

Brave is a good one.  I like brave because suffering and endurance, patience and restraint, a lot of that stuff has gone out of style.  (even loyalty gets spun as being synonymous with chump)  I wasn’t particularly brave when I wanted to go home from the jamboree.  I’ve wanted to give up on a lot of things on a lot of different occasions.  I’ve wanted to cash out and go home.

People who cash out are everywhere and it’s hard to blame any but the most extreme among them.

We get those extreme cases almost every day though.  Someone somewhere whose beliefs or person has been affronted and they don’t suck it up “like a man”.  They don’t let it bounce off them as if their self esteem were beyond the reach of subjective puerile harassment.  Instead they go get a gun.  Then they shoot up the base, or the campus, or the bank, or the family.  Or they set their house on fire and fly their single-engine plane into a building.

I might still be shaken up from that one to be honest.  Maybe that’s why I reacted so strongly to this news from Nigeria, about a bunch of cowards not so different from Mr. Stack who let external forces get the upper hand and drive them to do terrible things.

Charlie Robison has a song that sums some of my angst up pretty well.  Yes, he is from Texas.