Scout leaders are the unsung heroes of their communities
Tuesday August 12 2008
Men and women who give their free time to encourage teenagers to live healthy outdoor lives are so easily the object of ridicule
Punchestown 2008, and God in all his goodness had reserved the foulest monsoon of the decade for the great international scouting jamboree there last weekend. A dam burst in the clouds, and water erupted in a liquid avalanche. Ypres, weep: Passchentowne.
By Saturday evening, the camp-site was an uninhabitable swamp, infested with teenage-tadpoles. So the tented village was abandoned, as scout leaders had to improvise accommodation for the thousands of sodden teenagers.
"Scout leaders": what knowing smirks that term arouses amongst the smartly ignorant, with their fat cars in their Dublin 6 driveways and their holiday homes in Inishdear.
Men and women who give their free time to encourage teenagers to live healthy outdoor lives are so easily the object of ridicule and cheap jokes, especially from those who never do an unrewarded deed for others in their entire lives, from the font to the flame.
Why, there's something so anachronistic and reactionary about boy scouts, with their bizarre uniforms, their silly salutes and their weird rituals: isn't there? So fascist, even?
Actually, the boy-scout movement was the first great secular movement for worldwide brotherhood that the world has seen.
Yes, to be sure, Baden-Powell, the founder of the movement, was initially a ferocious imperialist, and his early boy-scout pamphlets were -- even by the standards of the time -- both appallingly racist and chauvinist. But he was, nonetheless, a very great man: had he stayed in the British army, he would certainly have achieved field marshal rank.
Instead, he chose to dedicate his life to the boy-scout movement as it blossomed across the world, just a century ago: and within years, aghast, he was able to see to the first generation of his scouts slaughtered in the Great War.
It was this catastrophe which caused him to turn the boy-scout movement into a genuine brotherhood, that knew neither class, nor creed, nor race. The movement rose above the empire in which it had been born, and which had given it much of its lore and its uniform.
And Baden-Powell's claim to true greatness lies in his renunciation of violent nationalism and imperialism during his peace-embracing speeches to the international scouting jamborees of 1919-20.
Alas, scouting soon became corrupted. In its more deviant forms (such as the Fianna), it could embrace violence. Adolf Hitler formed his own scout movement in 1922. The Deutsches Jungvolk was the Nazi equivalent of the cubs, and the Hitler Jugend the diabolical mirror of the boy scouts. Both copied Baden-Powell's model, in paramilitary-uniform, in patrol-structure, in scout-craft and in interest in nature: but instead of the international brotherhood of the scout-movement, the Hitler Youth promulgated violence and racial hatred.
Not surprisingly, one of Hitler's first acts on coming to power was to outlaw the German boy-scout movement, forcibly amalgamating it with The Hitler Youth.
The combined movement soon became the feeder-unit for the emerging SS. Scouts who resisted were amongst the first political prisoners: indeed, Pfadfinder was a recognised category of concentration camp inmate. And the most appalling proof of what a depraved boy-scout movement was capable of was revealed in Normandy in 1944 by the 12th SS Panzer Grenadier Division, "Hitler Jugend".
Its members truly lived up to their divisional name, even crucifying captured allied prisoners: some SS-troopers strapped on explosive-packs and hurled themselves against allied tanks, to become the 20th century's first suicide bombers.
But of course, any ideal can be debased. Did the bloodied tears of Gethsemane not lead to the fires of Tyburn and the racks of Torquemada? So what is actually most striking about the scout and guide movement is how forward looking it was.
It pioneered internationalism, environmentalism and conservationism, nearly a century before these things became fashionable. It taught young people regard for one another, duty towards the land they were born in, and respect for the countryside. It is no coincidence that 78pc of FBI agents, 26 of the first 29 US astronauts, and 72pc of all Rhodes scholars were once boy scouts.
All right, last weekend at Punchestown was a wash-out; but the thousands of teenagers there learnt more about triumphing over adversity, about keeping your sense of humour when you're wet and cold, and of the essentials of comradeship, than will those non-scouting barrels of teenage lard back at home, with their chins, their piles and their Playstations.
When all else from the year 2008 is gone from memory, the scouts of Punchestown still remember, with advantages, the friends they made from half a dozen countries, that distant August in a bog in Kildare.
But the real heroes in all this are those men and women who on Friday evenings come home at the end of a long week at work, and instead of relaxing for the weekend, get changed and go out again to run the local scout troop.
Unseen, unsung, modest and ordinary, they can expect no thanks from the broader community for their efforts on behalf of young people. Nor do they seek thanks. They merely seek to serve others, selflessly and invisibly. In their own, discreet, inscrutable way, they are one of the glories of our civilisation.
- Kevin Myers
