I don’t know why I’m thinking about this today, but suddenly I’m reminded of an unpleasant moment when I was in the Boy Scouts back in Hayden, Colorado. It was one of those moments where personal initiative met personal ambition in a storm of politics. (Warning, some language below not safe for work and/or sensitive types.)

For reasons I don’t fully remember, but some kind of troop exposition was involved, our troop (Troop 193?) had to come up with an information booth based on one of the various merit badges. The idea was to put together a booth so impressive and so full of information that grown men would cry and your troop would win prizes (something like that). For reasons I also don’t remember we either were assigned or chose “Astronomy“.

On the way back home after our weekly troop meeting, my friend Bobby and I started talking about the booth and, in a sudden flash of inspiration/evil (depends on your point of view, as you’ll see later) we suddenly started rattling off ideas about how to make the booth. We’d have slideshows of celestial features–basically our own planetarium–and diagrams of various constellations. I remember us being really excited about the possibilities and wanting to volunteer to run the planning. Keep in mind, neither of us were particularly ambitious at the time, but the Boy Scouts is/was supposed to be about training young leaders and we suddenly had the leadership bug.

The next day I brought our ideas up to our Senior Patrol Leader, let’s call him EJ, while we were at school. He mumbled something about needing troop permission or something or other but he clearly wasn’t as excited about our ideas as we were.

I told Bobby what happened and we went about our school business. At the next troop meeting I had my first experience with what I would later realize is called a “shit storm of petty bullshit” (that’s a technical term). Although because I was just a teen all I could say was “it fucking sucked” (another technical term).

One of the senior adults in the troop, let’s call him DJ, also happened to be the father of EJ. Rather than simply saying “no” to our ideas, he’d actually spent the week calling other high level Boy Scout leaders in the area to all but accuse Bobby and me of beating his son to get control of the exposition. It was all part of a plot to undermine the leadership of the Senior Patrol Leader and to kill children in Asia with unwashed spoons. (Hey, I was only a teenager, that’s about how much sense it made to me at the time.)

We then spent pretty much the entire rest of the troop meeting explaining how we were excited about our ideas and thought we were helping out the troop and no offense was intended. The approximate response was “Well, you’re fucking not helping and offense was taken!” (Well that was the tone anyway and I wish it was an exaggeration.) I was right at the edge of walking out–and learned later at least three people would have gone with me–but it all got resolved by a troop vote and suddenly Bobby and I were the equivalent of a dodgy interim government after a coup when were were voted in charge.

We then got to work putting together the booth. This involved photographing celestial features and making posters of the merit badges requirements. Every time we asked DJ for advice we got “you’re in charge, you tell me” (remember, DJ was the adult, EJ was the teen.)

Somehow we got it all put together and assembled at the exposition. The job was then to occupy the booth and answer questions about the merit badge requirements. If our show was good enough, our troop would win the prize.

We did a pretty good job–we even knew most of the celestial features in the slide show–but one judge walked up and asked “What is the altitude for geosynchronous orbit?” This is roughly the equivalent of asking a kid showing horses at the county fair what the air speed velocity of a laden swallow was. Yes, it had a connection–both are animals and geosynchronous orbit is in space–but we weren’t supposed to be experts in space, just in the astronomy badge.

In the end we didn’t win, a much more politically connected booth that only handed out a few pamphlets did–once again, I wish that was a joke–and EJ and DJ both pretty much scoffed at Bobby and I for the rest of the year four our failure.

At that point, Bobby and I pretty much resolved never to take any initiative or to show any leadership or to try to implement any good ideas ever again. I still haven’t– I think Bobby enlisted in the Air Force so the jury’s still out on whether he has or not.