3:28am October 31, 2014

I was in the Girl Scouts as a child.

I hated every moment spent with my troop. It was a social skills nightmare not just with the kids but with the parents who ran it, who were of the belief that if you brought a problem to an adults attention, you caused the problem. So I started trying to solve problems myself socially, and would still get accused of tattling even when I didn’t speak to an adult the entire time. This baffles me. How can you tattle without talking to an adult? But anyway that’s not the main gist of this story.

I did like the day camps. We went on nature walks in amazing places in California. There are lots of amazing places in California. Anyway on one nature walk, we were getting a lecture on the value of protecting the environment, not littering, and above all, the thing where a Girl Scout always leaves a place cleaner than she got there.

And for my own more selfish reasons, I was picking up bottle caps as we walked around the lake. There were bottle caps everywhere. Beautiful ones. I had a whole collection at home and I was going to be able to add dozens to that collection.

Another kid started picking up bottle caps too.

Eventually the counselor who’d just been lecturing us about all that saw us and went ballistic. “Those are filthy! You shouldn’t touch them! Throw them in the lake right now!” I couldn’t believe my ears. I hesitated a long time. I loved those bottle caps. And I didn’t want to be a litterbug. They were always telling us not to be litterbugs.

But she stood there and wouldn’t let us go anywhere until we threw the bottle caps in the lake.

It’s funny how you never learn what authority figures try to teach you. I learned nothing about ecology that day. But I learned a lot about hypocrisy. I felt queasy as I threw the bottle caps in the lake – the same queasy I felt killing butterflies because adults told me I could mount them and they’d look pretty. It took me a long time to learn that queasy feeling was my conscience.

But seriously, Girl Scout camp counselors telling campers to throw bottle caps in a lake, that hits some kind of low.