When was this? I assure you, girl scouts used to be – and some still are, depending on the troop – every bit as woodsy and gutsy as boy scouts.
I recently stood up to a mother who was using the framework of the GSA to teach her children to be intruding capitalists. The choral tradition in the U.S. includes some form of potluck…people bringing food/snacks to share. This one mom started bringing her daughters in their scouting uniforms to SELL cookies (and not cheaply, btw) at the table instead. Every single week. Which meant everyone else stopped bringing food to share. Most of our singers come straight from work and we don’t finish until 9:30pm, and most are young enough that money is a big issue, so this was rude and selfish on many levels. I don’t blame the kids…the oldest was around 10. But this was so antithetical to the ideals of the GSA that I finally had to tell the woman that it needed to stop. She’s enough younger than me that she would have been raised in a different GSA era, but then again, I know enough current troop leaders to know the ideals are still there for those who care to uphold them.
Ideals are only as sound as the people who uphold them.
