Ideas for Scoutmaster Minutes

Posted on November 20, 2014
The Pebble in Your Shoe
As you look at the mountain peak before you and plan for its accent, Is it likely not the peak that will defeat you, but the pebble in your shoe.


Posted March 8, 2013
The Thieves’ Knot
Set up:

The Thieves' Knot

Tie a thieves' knot using two different colored pieces of smooth (nylon) rope.  Hold the rope so you see the knot but not the ends of the rope.  After telling the story show the full thieves' knot with the ends.  After telling the lesson, pull on the standing part of the rope and the loose thieves' knot will pull apart.

The Story:
A sailor owned a foot locker.  It contained nothing of value, but held everything he owned.  He wanted to know if anyone got into the trunk, so he attached two ropes two the box and tied a thieves’ knot over the lid.  The knot looks like a square knot and he hoped the unsuspecting thief, might re-tie a square knot to cover his action.  The sailor, knowing the difference would know that his foot locker had been opened.

The lesson:
The thieves’ knot is a counterfeit.  It is a lie.  It will not hold and cannot be relied upon for even the lightest task.  It will pull lose.  It is a deception. The square knot on the other hand is true and can be relied upon to hold.  In life there are values and actions which are like a square knot, they ennoble, edify, empower, build and strengthen.  For every uplifting and ennobling action there is a counterfeit.  There are vices and acts like the thieves' knot, that destroy, imprison, shatter and enslave. 

You can trust a square knot to hold its position.  It will likely hold even when the rope itself would break in another spot. Your family, friends and community need you to be like the square knot so they can rely on you when they need you most. Choose caring over apathy, industriousness over laziness, love over hate, good over bad, helpful over hateful and light over dark so that you are free from addiction, have skills and can be useful like a square knot when you are needed.

Rodney Standage

Posted February 9, 2013
After the Shock is Gone.

Adapted from an article by Eric Felton

Marcel Duchamp caused a stir in 1917 by calling a urinal 'Fountain.'

In his 1962 book "The Theory of the Avant-Garde" Renato Poggioli observed that "Like any artistic tradition, no matter how antitraditional it may be, the avant-garde also has its conventions." The most conventional of modernist conventions has been the need to shock and offend, doing so, as the lingo has it, by "transgressing boundaries." But once all the boundaries have been blurred, what's left?
Salman Rushdie—whose credentials at discomfiting theocrats are unimpeachable—has lamented how lame and predictable transgressive art has become: "Once the new was shocking, not because it set out to shock, but because it set out to be new. Now, all too often, the shock is the new. And shock, in our jaded culture, wears off easily."

Where does that leave the artist or curator who wants to shake things up? According to Mr. Rushdie, he "must try harder and harder, go further and further, and this escalation may now have become the worst kind of artistic self-indulgence."


Not only is it self-indulgent, it's self-defeating. Once the problem was, as Mr. Rushdie puts it, that shock wears off. But things are so far gone that shock rarely registers in the first place. This is the natural result of decades—the better part of a century, really—of artists using up the public's reservoir of indignation. And if transgressive art can't shock, what does it have to offer? After all, once you've seen Duchamp's "Fountain" and gotten the joke, is there anything worth revisiting in it? Whatever frisson it might once have delivered was used up in its first display. Once the shock is gone, all that's left is a urinal. 

In this, our transgressive artists are rather like the frustrated scaremongers in the film "Monsters, Inc." The job of the workers on the "scare floor" is to gather the energy of fright from the children they spook. But as innocence is lost, the kiddies get harder to scare, and soon the factory is sputtering. The monsters finally change course, making their marks laugh instead of scream. 

Turn the tables and let decency, refinement, moral courage and the values found in the Scout Law and Oath re-frame the discussion.  Have you ever been awed by something truly beautiful, noble or dignified?  How many times can you watch a beautiful sunrise, sunset or a storm on the horizon and not want to see it again and recall the beauty?  The shock of a noble deed never gets old; be noble. 



Posted January 30, 2013
From George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" (1946):

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly. . . .

If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase—some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse—into the dustbin, where it belongs.