The Cub Scouts have started recruiting at my child’s school. I am not sure what to make of it.  I feel as if I have to take his post-brainwashing session postcard, inviting him to be part of the “fun” and burn it.  They are invading his school in a very communistic stlye propaganda type way that frightens me…. all this talk about team work and god and working for the “pack”.  hmph.  This is the part of me that doesn’t work well with being a mother - damn my inherent nonconformist thread.  I promise I have tried to shake it all my life (sort of) - to be aprt of a group of people who seem really happy teaming up against the world - but the reality is it all scares me silly.  And I decided several years ago that anyone using god as a front will eventually find a way to exclude others who aren’t of the same ilk from the group.  Case in point:  gay troop leader who had devoted most of his life to boyscouting getting kicked out as a leader because it was discovered he was gay.  Pardon me for being skeptical and for not forgiving and fogetting, but that right there is a big point against scouting for me. 

But my son is so excited about it.  It has been all he has talked about for days.  Dilemma.  Do I swallow my “issues” and let him figure out if that is the life for him?  Do I protest because it is an institution that, several years ago, projected utterly blantant discrimination toward a group of people that make up the majority of the people my son and I know and love.  What does a good parent do in this situation? Really I don’t mean to get political - I am just having a bit of a quagmire here. 

I guess the thing to do is take him to the meeting myself and ask a lot of questions and see what it’s all about before I cast judgement.  I don’t want to be discriminatory, even toward a discriminating institution.  I will focus on the people involved here and not the institution itself - because, if I have learned anything in my miniscule thirty years on this planet, it is that an institutions beliefs have little to nothing to do with that of the majority of its members.  Geez, maybe I should just turn off my overly-analytical switch and let my kid be a kid.  For goodness sakes, it’s just the cubscouts.  It’s just making pinewood derby cars and camping and fishing. Right?

This entry was posted on Monday, August 21st, 2006 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Daily Living, Mental Environment, Social Justice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.