Scouting Then and Now

If you can judge how far cripples have come by how the boy scouts treat us, it sure looks like cripples in the U.S.A have progressed a helluva lot over the last few decades or so. Because way back when I was but a wee criplet , I joined my local boy scout troop. And I remember that we met in the basement of a church or a school or something. And I remember that the men who were the troop leaders would carry me up and down the stairs in my wheelchair to get me to and from the meetings. But now I see where Scouting America has started up what it calls its Special Needs Prepared Camp program. (I hate that term Special Needs, too, but I’ll save that for later.) Basically, it’s an 11-point checklist that camp operators can use to judge how well that their facility is comfortably usable by a wide range of cripples. Anyone that can check all of the boxes gets a sign that they can put up at their campground declaring that it is “Special Needs Prepared.” I never went to scout camp, probably because I didn’t know there was such a thing. But even if I did know about it, I was used to assuming back then that most everything was inaccessible to me so I probably would have assumed the same in this case. I sure was an ambitious little scout. I wanted to be an eagle scout and have a sash loaded with merit badges. I only made it as far as second class. I don’t recall doing anything to work my way out of tenderfoot and up to the next rank of second class. I think that after a while they just kicked me upstairs. And the fact that I didn’t go any farther than that was no one’s fault but my own. Oh sure, I still badly wanted the rank of eagle and the gaudy sash and all of the glory and prestige that came with them. But they made you work for those things. You had to earn them. Nobody was going to just give you those things, not even if you were a cripple and they felt sorry for you. But maybe they should have. If someone had just given me all of that stuff the first time I showed up for a meeting, I probably would have grabbed it and left and never looked back. And then they wouldn’t have had to carry me in my wheelchair up and down the stairs all of the time. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH-nvFX30Mk2fJx9uI