(HOST) Commentator Willem Lange recently attended a traditional ceremony that brought back old memories.
(LANGE) There are words and phrases that have been with us as long as we can remember, and to which we resonate or retreat. Bedtime prayers, Bible stories, fairy tales, famous speeches; the Lord’s Prayer, the kaddish. “With malice toward none; with charity for all…” “Ask not what your country can do for you.” Almost anywhere your mind can go, someone’s been there before you.
I sat in the Weathersfield Center meeting house on a Sunday afternoon, at a Boy Scout Eagle Court of Honor for a son of some friends of mine.
After the Pledge of Allegiance and Invocation, we stood for the Scout oath. Sixty years dropped away. My hand rose in the old three-fingered salute as we recited, “On my honor I will do my best: To do my duty to God and my country…,” followed by the twelve virtues: “Trustworthy, loyal, helpful…” How could those words have stayed with me all those years?
My old Handbook for Boys is here on the desk beside me – 38th Printing, September 1945. There are check marks beside various skills we had to learn: semaphore, Morse code, and deaf alphabet; knots; proper treatment of the flag; fire-building; and first aid.
Even in 1947 I found the Handbook a little hokey. Written by older men with nostalgia for the age of chivalry; educated in Greek virtues; preaching a code of honor based on Moses, Christ, Washington, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Wilson. I suspect the current handbook is much the same.
The illustrations show Scouts as uniformed, tall white guys. The reality of our troop was different. We wore whatever items of uniform we could scrounge. Nobody’s family had any money. We looked like a squad in a World War II movie, with every possible ethnic caricature represented. Our patrol leader was John Bialy, whose father was probably Bialystock. In those days everybody wanted to be American.
Still, the handbook’s practical tips are helpful: the location of pressure points to control bleeding, the rescue of drowning persons, map-reading, and making fire with a bow and drill.
Through it all run themes of uncompromising probity and good citizenship. We found them nettlesome, but unarguable. Each week, as we stood in formation and recited the Pledge, the Oath, and the Law, we glimpsed briefly the possibilities in our future: “a nation dedicated to peace and fair dealing with all peoples.”
Each of us recited the pledge again that Sunday: pledged to do his best to keep himself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight. Sixty years ago I failed to perceive that escape clause in the pledge. It’s not that we will do all those things; it’s that we’ll always do our best to do them, keep trying when we fail, and hope our planet will be a better place when we leave.
This is Willem Lange up in Orford, New Hampshire, and I gotta get back to work.