On Being Prepared, Part II

I can remember the exact moment I decided to leave Guides. I was sitting in a meeting of Joint Council, surrounded by fellow teenaged Scouts and Guides, all friends, discussing who knows what, probably one of the annual JC camps, two giant parties held in the winter and the spring. I find it difficult to listen to speeches and discussion at the best of times, and my sense of discomfort made it easy to look around instead of paying attention. As it happened, I’d noticed that sense of discomfort growing in me at Guiding events for a few years previous.

People who know me from school or just from JC might be surprised to learn this (or am I flattering myself?), but at Guides, I was often rebellious and rambunctious, even as a little kid. If we were making wicker napkin rings with fabric flowers, I’d tear up my petals to make a face. If we were voting on patrol leaders, I’d tell everyone not to vote for me. I’d work around the letter of the program while deliberately ignoring its spirit, contradict the leaders (I remember arguing that I should be allowed to call someone a “prig” in a skit about Robert Baden-Powell’s schooldays, because if C. S. Lewis could say it, then so could I), and try to make the other girls laugh. This culminated with Senior Branches meetings where I often found myself sitting in the middle of our O-shaped ring of tables while all the others sat on the outside, purposely being loud, irreverent, and disruptive — the class clown, except for us not being in class.

I couldn’t figure out why my impulses toward this attention-whorish behaviour had been steadily increasing as I got older. I knew enough to understand that there was something under my skin, something that always had been there for me in Guides but was getting worse. But what?

And then, at that meeting, I realized: I had only vague memories of my Brownie unit, but my Guide company was diverse, with many girls of varied ethnic, racial, religious, social, and economic backgrounds. My Pathfinder company was a little less so, although by the end, it was 50% Jew, thanks to two out of four of us being me and a good friend from Hebrew school. But it seemed to me like every time I moved up in the Guiding ranks, my groups shed girls. I looked around, at the people who’d stayed or who’d joined the program at my age. And then I saw that in a room of a few dozen teenagers, there was one girl of Asian descent, and me, a white Jew, and everyone else seemed to be white, from Christian (culturally, if not necessarily religiously) families, who identified with Scottish or Irish tradition.

I in no way wish to suggest that this background is how those individuals do or would have identified themselves (how can I know that?), or, more importantly, that it’s any less valid, worthwhile, or welcoming a background than any other, or that any of the people I met in Guides and Scouts are anything but warm, friendly, good, lovely people. On the contrary, they — you — are, some of the best women and men I’ve ever met. What mattered to me at that moment wasn’t that I was surrounded by people whose backgrounds were often different from my own — after all, since high school, most of my friends are white, from Christian families, etc. But realizing I was the only Jew in the room made me suddenly see what it was about Guides that was chafing me.

Let me be honest: while GGC was an environment where I had many fantastic experiences, where I met awesome people, and where I learned a lot of great lessons and skills, it was also one of the few places I encountered anti-Semitism and ignorance. Very, very rarely, there was the deliberate but unforgettable kind (perhaps the memory that has stuck with me the most is that of a friend in Guides asking if I was a Jew, how come I didn’t have horns), but more often, there was the well meaning kind, the kind that’s embedded in program and values and is difficult to explain to the people doing it because it happens only with the best of intentions.

But it’s uncomfortable to sit silently while the rest of your camp chants a grace or sings Christmas carols you don’t know or don’t feel right saying, with the adults in charge trying to persuade you that it doesn’t really “mean anything” and so you should join in; insulting to have otherwise awesome leaders tell you that, oh c’mon, they don’t think your mom will mind if you break a certain ancillary Jewish law for the sake of planning a program-approved proper camp, or roll their eyes at the idea that a girl might want to substitute “Hashem” for “my God” in the Guiding Promise; and most of all, uncomfortable to have it constantly assumed that the values in the Guiding program are universal and acultural when in fact many of them reflect ideas of a very specific geographical, temporal, political, and religious environment.

I know this depends very much on the atmosphere of a particular company. There are Jewish scout troops in Ottawa, for instance, where the leaders incorporate Jewish ethics with Scouting program to apparently great effect. Friends who grew up Guiding in other areas tell me that their leaders ignored or emphasized parts of the program based on their own convictions. And I also know that most Guiders and many adult members of GGC try very hard to make girls of all faiths and backgrounds feel welcome — witness the recent change to the Guiding Promise or the carefully thought-out Religion in Life badges. For many, I’m sure these accommodations mean a lot more than they did to me. But all I can tell you is how I felt about the companies I experienced where I lived.

I don’t want to suggest that I left Guiding or found it uncomfortable because I’m a Jew; that’s certainly oversimplifying. I left Guiding because the constellation of values I consider to be my own — some Jewish, some political, some intellectual — seemed to be more and more in conflict with some values in the Guiding program as I got older. I appreciate that differences in values don’t necessarily mean inability to get along, but there are inclusive environments of difference and exclusive ones, and although the individual Guides and Scouts I know were certainly inclusive, I felt the overall atmosphere of Guiding, despite the committed and sincere efforts of many of its staff and volunteers, to be exclusive. Maybe the program got more intense; maybe I just started to have a better understanding of who I was and what I stood for; or maybe the older I got, the more freedom of principle I expected to have. Again, all I know is how I felt.

Now here’s the important part. Guides Canada is a private institution, and my intention here is never, never to suggest that it is doing something wrong because its practices or its values don’t always reflect my own. Suggesting that Guides change for me is just as wrong as suggesting that I change for Guides — we both have cultural independence, and if we choose to stick with the values we uphold, that’s our prerogative. I accept that my unwillingness to change or to abandon certain among my ideas has consequences: I will no longer find myself comfortable with friends in a social environment I would otherwise enjoy. I lose out.

Similarly, I have no problem if Guides incorporates, for example, Christian practices or ideals into its structure and content. That’s absolutely cool, and good for the organization for staying true to its founding principles. However, the consequences are that you can’t have it both ways: you can’t embrace girls from every background if you’re going to be grounded in a particular set of culturally or politically specific values. Again, that’s perfectly okay; the problem comes when this trade-off is so invisible to policymakers or to members that it can’t be explicitly addressed* in the context of related issues, like dropping enrolment, or individual girls’ or leaders’ discomfort within their companies.

So I left. A selfish act, maybe — after all, I’d taken advantage of others’ time and effort for years of fun with other girls, and here I am not contributing my own for the benefit of the next generation. Or, worse, I’d discovered a problem with something around me, and instead of bringing it to other people’s attention so they could try to do something about it or hanging around to see if I could fix it, I skedaddled. But I couldn’t do it any more, and I didn’t want to be the bratty teen disrupting the meeting for the friends who really wanted to be there. Besides, I had something else taking up most of my time — theatre.

I wasn’t making up a word of what I wrote two weeks ago: joining Guiding was and is one of the most valuable experiences in my life. However, so was leaving Guiding after a certain age. And both decisions are ones I’d make again.

*And to be fair, perhaps it is explicitly addressed at higher levels — after all, how would I know? This is just the impression I came away with as a member, hearing the debates and problems second-hand, if at all.