Little Rock   There aren’t enough big issues in the world to fight about it seems, so just to give us something else to think about, the scouts thought it was important to get back in the news. Clearly it has become boring to learn camp craft, come to grips with nature, and learn to work together towards a goal, so taking a page from the front page controversy ignited by the recent flame throwing by President Trump at the Boy Scouts National Jamboree, the Girl Scouts didn’t feel they were getting enough press so they tossed a burst of napalm out there on their own.

Seems the head of the Girl Scouts went after her counterpart with both barrels. According to the Times,

…in a blistering letter this week, the president of Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. accused Boy Scouts of America of trying to undercut the organization through a “covert campaign to recruit girls.” The letter became public…, laying bare an exceptional and surprising fissure in what had been an amicable relationship between two ubiquitous organizations. “I formally request that your organization stay focused on serving the 90 percent of American boys not currently participating in Boy Scouts,” Kathy Hopinkah Hannan, the president of the Girl Scouts, wrote to her counterpart, Randall Stephenson of the Boy Scouts. Ms. Hopinkah Hannan added, “It is therefore unsettling that B.S.A. would seek to upend a paradigm that has served both boys and girls so well through the years.”

Both of them are big corporate whoops, the boy scout is the head of AT&T and the girl scout is a managing partner at the big auditing firm KPMG, so the incident as quickly became about their companies as about scouting, so that everyone would know what was really important about all of this.

So the girl scout apologized after the boy scout tattled to her boss at KPMG, and the boy scouts swear they are just talking, not poaching, but who cares, you might ask? Both have about a million members and both are losing membership over recent years. The Boy Scouts already allow girls in their older teens program called Venturing, and I’ll bet there are more chaperons than venturers at some of those events.

My brother-in-law told me a story about his son’s Boy Scout Troop where he had been an assistant scoutmaster. The sister of one of the troop came to all of the meetings, camp outs, and participated in all of the events with her brother and the rest of the boys. When her brother became 18 and mustered out, receiving his last award, their troop gave his sister a special award as well, since she had been an unofficial member and one of their scouts too in everything but uniform.

What’s the harm, one way or another? Might be a better thing for everyone in the country if boys and girls learned how to do things collectively, especially in the great outdoors. The only clear takeaway recently is that we need to keep President Trump away from the Scouts, and maybe Wall Street and big businesses ought to avoid the Scouts as well, until all of them learn to behave, and let the boys and girls and their parents work it out themselves for the good of everyone involved.

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Please enjoy the Foo Fighters – The Sky is a Neighborhood.

Thanks to KABF.