Most guys will recognize that as the Boy Scout’s motto. When asked, “Prepared for what?” the founder of the Scouts said, “Why, any old thing.” Including, apparently, illegal aliens and despondent war veterans:
According to the linked article in the New York Times here’s a typical Boy Scount Explorer exercise in Imperial, California:
Ten minutes into arrant mayhem in this town near the Mexican border, and the gunman, a disgruntled Iraq war veteran, has already taken out two people, one slumped in his desk, the other covered in blood on the floor.
The responding officers — eight teenage boys and girls, the youngest 14 — face tripwire, a thin cloud of poisonous gas and loud shots — BAM! BAM! — fired from behind a flimsy wall. They move quickly, pellet guns drawn and masks affixed.
"United States Border Patrol! Put your hands up!" screams one in a voice cracking with adolescent determination as the suspect is subdued.
It is all quite a step up from the square knot.
If this doesn’t strike you as the Junior Minutemen – or worse, the outfit that Pope Benedict joined when he was young - you aren’t paying attention. According to the article, the Explorers train for terrorism and escalating border violence:
“This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl,” said A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff’s deputy here in Imperial County, whose life clock, he says, is set around the Explorers events he helps run. “It fits right in with the honor and bravery of the Boy Scouts.”
Among the things to be prepared for is how to quiet a lookout:
"Put him on his face and put a knee in his back," a Border Patrol agent [involved in the Explorer training] explained. "I guarantee that he'll shut up."
Here’s a tidbit from one Explorer exercise in Arizona:
In a competition in Arizona that he did not oversee, Deputy Lowenthal said, one role-player [sic] wore traditional Arab dress. "If we're looking at 9/11 and what a Middle Eastern terrorist would be like," he said, "then maybe your role-player would look like that. I don't know, would you call that politically incorrect?"
Well yes, not to mention stupid. Did he ride a camel in the Arizona desert, too?
Spot wonders whether the training includes herding lines of old ladies across the street in shackles. This ain’t your Daddy’s Boy Scouts, that’s for sure.
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