I would be the Queen of merit badges

I have a friend who works for a news station and does all kinds of cool video and video-editing stuff. The other day he said he'd been asked to go teach a local Boy Scouts troop a bit about what he does. It's for their Cinematography merit badge.

My friend couldn't believe they had a Cinematography merit badge, since he never heard anything about that when he was a Boy Scout. In his words:

"I didn't know they had cool merit badges. All we ever did was crap like the Run for 100 Miles merit badge or the Let's Go Out in the Freezing Cold and Shoot Stuff with Arrows badge. If I'd known I could have been doing Cinematography it would have been way different."

I told him not to forget the "Just play basketball in the gym every week and call it Scouting and then go steal refreshments from the girls who actually planned a real activity" badge. Not that I'm bitter. But seriously. You don't steal my treats. I'm sure my reactions to such thievery had something to do with why I didn't get asked out much in high school. Like I wanted to date lazy, self-entitled brownie stealers, though.

Anyway.

Not to rub it in, but I just looked it up and there are even more cool things my friend could have been learning but probably didn't:

Citizenship in the World
Environmental Science
Fingerprinting
Public Speaking
Theater
Painting
Law
Photography
Crime Prevention

Cool, huh? And here's my friend who didn't know about these, which is probably the reason why he never got his Eagle Scout (which, according to Scout propaganda people and LDS mothers, means that you will never be employable and that Eagle Scouts will always beat you out for anything you may ever want in life, because they're just better). Despite this, he still seems to be a semi-functioning individual. I think you can tell that the hurt is still there, though.

The LDS Church is really involved with the Boy Scouts of America and encourages its boys to participate. And I guess I see how that would have been started: Here's this organization which, back in the day, was already doing and promoting the kinds of things Church leaders wanted their boys to be learning. So by hitching their wagon to the Boy Scouts, they avoided a duplication of effort.

Only it's trickier for the girls, because we have absolutely nothing to do with the Girl Scouts of America. For the girls, the Church created its own goal-setting/personal advancement-type program. And I wonder why that is. Are the Girls Scouts too hard-core? Not hard-core enough? Too many cookies? Not enough lessons about drinking 3-5 servings of milk per day to prepare our bodies for childbearing?

Would love to hear your thoughts.

Posted in: being a Mormon