Cookies
This will be blasphemy. I hate the very idea of Girl Scout Cookies. I remember selling them in my short stint in the scouts, which was a kind of torture, and which didn't get our troop out into the wilds. Even that long ago, it became an end in itself, instead of a means to get out of the city. For an inner city kid, the organization was anemic, quite unlike the image of getting urban children out among the trees learning to start fires - as it were. I did once attend a Girl Scout day camp for a few weeks, and I learned how to braid plastic lanyards and glue popsicle sticks - crappy crafts that I knew enough to hate at the time.
If the GSA had bake sales or other fund raisers to clearly send children off to camp, I would have no objection. That a commercial cookie is sold by "scouts" it means little girls are learning not scouting, but marketing. I don't care how tasty the confection might be, this is the whoring of small girls. Worse, pimping, because they don't even get to keep and use the proceeds.
Cranky of me? Take away your own lust for thin mints, nostalgia for what it was supposed to accomplish, and look at what is really happening. The Boy Scouts (of America) have their own issues, but they don't sell cookies, do they? Getting little girls mentors, all going out camping is a wonderful ideal. Focusing on coercing them to sell sugar, for no clear benefit, is a skewed kind of value to be teaching. Nay, demanding.
Ok, maybe some troops may actually have real outings. Mine didn't, and I expect many are the same. I did a year, and called it quits. Maybe the whole idea is obsolete. It's been going out of style for forty years.
Oh, yeah, I just remembered, I'm 48 as of last week. So long thinking, well, I'll have to add that number, and when the date passed, I rather forgot. But then, took me until the 4th of this month to adjust the date on my watch. February will mess you up.
If the GSA had bake sales or other fund raisers to clearly send children off to camp, I would have no objection. That a commercial cookie is sold by "scouts" it means little girls are learning not scouting, but marketing. I don't care how tasty the confection might be, this is the whoring of small girls. Worse, pimping, because they don't even get to keep and use the proceeds.
Cranky of me? Take away your own lust for thin mints, nostalgia for what it was supposed to accomplish, and look at what is really happening. The Boy Scouts (of America) have their own issues, but they don't sell cookies, do they? Getting little girls mentors, all going out camping is a wonderful ideal. Focusing on coercing them to sell sugar, for no clear benefit, is a skewed kind of value to be teaching. Nay, demanding.
Ok, maybe some troops may actually have real outings. Mine didn't, and I expect many are the same. I did a year, and called it quits. Maybe the whole idea is obsolete. It's been going out of style for forty years.
Oh, yeah, I just remembered, I'm 48 as of last week. So long thinking, well, I'll have to add that number, and when the date passed, I rather forgot. But then, took me until the 4th of this month to adjust the date on my watch. February will mess you up.
Labels: rant
Posted by Zhoen on Saturday, March 06, 2010
13 comments:
I think I lasted one day in the cub scouts.
First, Happy Birthday, Zhoen! 48 is a nice round number, easily divisible by many of my favorite numbers.
Second, I concur on everything you wrote about GS and cookie pushers. Cookies? Is that sexist or what? Talk about reinforcing stereotypes. As for marketing, what they're learning to do is disguise corporate greed as charitable giving, while exploiting the unpaid labor of children.
It's demeaning.
(rant off - you can tell I wasn't thrilled with my daughter being a girl scout, but she had many otherwise beneficial experiences - she knows how to make a sit-upon from newspapers and plastic grocery bags, which has to count for something, right?)
Dale,
You did better than me. I wish I'd left sooner.
Crow,
Glad your daughter had some good experiences there.
We didn't sell cookies in English Girl Guides (Scouts), we learned first aid and lighting fires and my lanyard was lovely white cord knotted into a twist with a loop on the end for my whistle. We participated in remembrance day parades and carried the flag (colors) in church sometimes. Carol singing too. It was a way of socializing with other children as I was always new kid in town. (I do agree that girls here are learning marketing and competitive sales goals. Sad priorities.)
Ah, but Boy Scouts in the UK used to have 'Bob a Job' week, which meant they would do just about anything for a bob/shilling/5p.
Selling biscuits might be thought tame by comparision!
ER,RR,
The non-US versions are (I hope) different. Here, it's gone toxic.
Doing a job for a neighbor would have been better than selling commercial cookies at a grocery store entrance.
I made you a special birthday (o), but I can't tell it apart from all the others.
I lasted about six months in the Brownies!(pre Girl Guides, awful brown dresses and yellow neckscarves) Never did get to do any badges!!
I was a Pathfinder in Holland as well. It was a Sea Troupe. We learned how important it was to have your ropes all coiled up without tangles in case you suddenly had to throw or catch a mooring line.(Irrelevant to my life, other than "Be Prepared" and my garden hose is always tidy). I remember rope bridges built between trees too. Nostalgia. I confess to having made a papier mache toadstool for the Brownies to dance around.
My son, in Cubs, has had to sell popcorn to friends and family, and spend time at a local mall selling chocolate bars. I'd prefer to just give an extra 100$ and save him the trouble, but not every parent can do the same.
I've got quite positive memories of Girl Guides. I went off to (relatively) posh Girls' Private School at 11, which was a relief in many ways, but at the same time joined a Guide co. which was in my own part of town. I enjoyed being with girls more from where I'd originally come from, and somehow it was fairly free of judgement about class and background compared to other areas of that small town life. There were problems getting camp permits, though we did a bit, and hiking, and there was a really nifty little log cabin deep in the woods where we stayed.
The other thing about it was it was the only place I felt able to chuck myself about physically, develop physical strength, hefting logs and playing quite rough tag-type games, rather than the horrible sportiness of school games.
Yes, good memories and certainly no baking cookies, or anything similar. Maybe some jumble sales.
Though I was always a bit embarrassed to talk about it or be seen in uniform by school friends, since it wasn't very cool.
Oh yes, happy very late birthday. I'm quite OK with being 48 I think.
Lucy,
I liked the idea of Girl Scouts, it's the use of it to sell cookies to raise money that then doesn't go to doing what Scouting is supposed to do that gets up my nose.
Sounds like you had the kind of experience I expected, but didn't have. Glad it seems to be working better over there at least.
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