Of course, they wouldn't have ANY knife injuries if the boys just stayed inside, drank sodas, watched TV and played video games. They'd be PERFECTLY safe then. At least until they died of heart disease and diabetes at age 45.
Before this rant gets into full swing, let me disclose that I was THE camp medic for one of the largest BSA camps in the United States. I saw and treated, or helped treat, everything from a drug overdose to broken bones to unexplained unconsciousness to poison ivy and mosquito bites to dirt-bike-engendered road rash to head/neck injuries to arrow and airgun wounds to horse-throw injuries--and, yes, plenty of cuts and burns. (I was also an Eagle Scout, and was one of the ones who taught the younger Scouts wilderness survival stuff, after I got bitten hard by that bug early in my Scouting career.)
You want to ban what causes injuries? Ban rope. Yes, that's right: rope. You see, the one most dangerous thing we ever encountered at that camp--and we did it every week--was rope swings. Someone throws a rope over a branch and ties it off; kids swing on it; kids fall off; kids break bones; I run kids in to the nearest hospital to treat the fracture. By the end of the summer I could truthfully tell incoming groups that EVERY SINGLE TIME somebody hung a rope swing, I ended up running a kid in to the hospital. Nobody believed me, of course--but that's why there was a problem, because they're deceptively dangerous.
Want to ban what actually kills people? Ban axes--or, better, tree-cutting equipment in general. I had no fatalities on my watch--which, with a camp of 500 teenagers with knives, guns, arrows, axes, horses, fire, and whatever illegal drugs they've managed to bring with them, is not a given. But the year after I left a kid was chopping a dead tree, a high branch broke off and fell several yards, and penetrated his skull.
But do you know what? I DON'T advocate taking ropes away from Scouts. Or knives. Or axes. Or saws. Or fire. Because, do you know what? That's what Scouting is about. Life is dangerous. You aren't going to get out of it alive. Scouting is basically just homeschooling in basic life skills. These involve danger. It is the LEARNING about HOW TO DEAL WITH sharp edges, hot fires, wild animals, trackless wildernesses, large bodies of water, real guns, and the like that equips boys to deal with them. (Hell, throw "young women" into that list of hazards--though I can't credit Boy Scouts with teaching much in that particular area.
) You know what? You're going to get hurt. And you're going to end up okay. Even if you flipping DIE, God's got that angle covered, too.
Of all the organizations that stand to lose by losing sight of this, Boy Scouts is probably at greatest risk. Because if Boy Scouts loses this, it loses its soul.
I saw a little of this when I was in Boy Scouts. My first High Adventure trek was at the Whiting Scout Ranch--now closed--in northern Arizona. Like Philmont, it involved a week-plus hike between various stations, where we rappelled down into the Little Colorado River gorge, started fires with flint and steel, molded and shot our own black powder bullets--that kind of stuff. When I went to Philmont a year or so later, we did similar stuff--but there was one pervasive, noticeable difference. Philmont was so heavily-traveled that there were far, far more rules--far more "stick to the trail". At Whiting, the task was to get from Point A to Point B--and it was up to you to figure out how to do it. You had a topo map; you had a compass; magnetic north's over there; declination's 12 degrees; figure it out. You know, we got there. Sometimes took us a few extra hours, and half a dozen extra miles, but we by golly DID IT. Philmont, by contrast, was a bit of a disappointment in this respect. Travel was mostly on roads that a motor vehicle could negotiate just fine. Now, Philmont was still great--and I hope to high Heaven that there's still a Philmont worth the drive when my kids get to that age. (And it's coming up--my oldest son just turned eight the day before yesterday, and finished his Wolf Cub Scout requirements last night.) But--it was a step down. The elevation was "high"--but the "adventure" part was a noticeable few notches down.
Yes, yes, YES, I know what you're thinking, and I'll say it for you: there are so many Scouts crawling all over Philmont that they have to turn it into a freaking Howard Johnson's just to keep them from trampling every plant, surrounding every campsite with half-buried human waste, and gunning each other down with AK-47s borrowed from their street gangs back home. Yes, I'll concede that some regulation is necessary. Remember, I'm the old anti-rope-swing Nazi. But--but you don't have to LIKE it. You don't have to pave every trail, put a metal ring around every fire (or, better yet, ban the fires altogether and have the kids eat gorp or MREs or intravenous Ringer's lactate or whatever the heck they're supposed to subsist on in the postmodern age.)
At the very least, Scouting's leadership needs to look right in the eye the fact that such overregulation and hypersensitivity to the dangers can--and WILL, IF NOT RECOGNIZED AS A PROBLEM AND ADDRESSED AS THE PROBLEM IT IS, cause Boy Scouts to become too pale of an imitation of what it once was, to attract enough participation to make it work keeping.
I see the same thing going on in other areas of life. When I was in high school (this was in the '80s, folks--not the 1880s, either--so not TOO long ago), my high school had a trap and skeet club. We weren't allowed to carry our 12-gauges into the classrooms, but we WERE encouraged to bring them to school. We just left them in the principal's office and picked them up at the end of the day, after classes were over. "Hi, Rose!" "Hi, J.D.!" "Here's my gun!" "Thanks, J.D.--see you after school; have a great day!" After school, we'd lie around on the front lawn with our guns, waiting for our moms to pick us up. This was right, smack-dab on the main street of one of the biggest cities in the U.S. Nowadays, there's this federal gun-free-school-zones act that's supposed to criminalize the guy who drives down any road within hundreds of feet of a school with an unloaded gun in his trunk, I gather. And you're telling me we're safer? Ever hear of Columbine High School? Virginia Tech? The rules aren't helping, people! The national parks, the city parks are getting closed down to anything but on-road travel and designated-campsite camping. What the heck reason is there to have a park anymore? They're banning hunting in wide swaths of the West because the anti-gun folks joined forces with the anti-hunting "environmentalists" and claim that lead bullets left in dead animals are poisoning a few dozen California condors. I mean, I'm as keen on endangered species protection as the next (sane) guy--but if that's where society is headed, I may want to reconsider my stance against cramming every condor out there with stuffing and deep-frying it. Hell, if every square inch of the outdoors is a "no trespassing" zone, we won't even get to SEE the dang birds anyway!
You know those science-fiction stories you used to read about everybody living in these bubble-domed cities, wearing uniform jumpsuits, and being afraid of going outside? You thought that people would just gravitate to that because they were too timid to step outdoors? No--I'll tell you how that's going to happen: the U.S. Department of the Interior is going to declare that every square foot of land outside city limits is a no-trespassing zone for everybody except federal forest rangers, and the only people out there except federal law enforcement agents are going to be rabid marijuana growers and freakish lunatics who've not yet been rounded up into the asylums.
I always used to think that this song--I first heard the Tesla version, but I gather that theirs was a cover of a 1970 version by Five Man Electrical Band--was over-the-top, anti-establishment nonsense. I am no longer so sure:
SIGNS
Sign, Sign everywhere a sign;
Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind.
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign?
And the sign said "long haired freaky people need not apply."
So I tucked my hair up under my hat and I went in to ask him why.
He said, "You look like a fine upstanding young man; I think you'll do."
So I took off my hat; I said, "Imagine that, huh, me working for you!"
Woah!
Sign, Sign, everywhere a sign;
Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind;
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign?
And the sign said anybody caught trespassing would be shot on sight.
So I jumped the fence and yelled at the house, "Hey! what gives you the right
To put up a fence to keep me out or to keep Mother Nature in?
If God was here, He'd tell you to your face, Man you're some kinda sinner!"
Sign, Sign, everywhere a sign;
Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind;
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign?
"Now, hey you Mister! Can't you read? You got to have a shirt and tie to get a seat!
You can't even watch, no you can't eat, you ain't supposed to be here!"
Sign said you got to have a membership card to get inside. Uh!
And the sign said, "Everybody welcome: come in, kneel down and pray."
But when they passed around the plate at the end of it all,
I didn't have a penny to pay. So I got me a pen and a paper and I made up my own little sign:
I said, "Thank you, Lord, for thinking about me, I'm alive and doing fine."
Sign, Sign, everywhere a sign;
Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind;
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign?
Sign, Sign, everywhere a sign;
Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind;
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign?
Well, there you go. Rant over. Back to my white-collar job.
