Third Eagle

Just want to shout out to my daughter Alexia, who finished her board of review today for her Eagle Scout rank.

And a shout out to her scoutmaster and my wife Michelle, who has done a lot for the girls of Troop 1010 in the past two years.

Feels like we should be able to retire now. But that won't happen. First of all because Michelle's assistant Scoutmaster would kill us both and not even bother waiting for us to fall asleep before she did so. That and we recognize that we're in Scouting for the long-term, even with our daughter now aging out of the program.

Here she is directing traffic at the last leg of her Eagle project. It was cold that night and she got yelled at by a lady who was tired of waiting in line to see the light parade. But she did it all. I'm very proud of her.

Troop 1010, Two Years On

Two years ago, we started with a flag in a plastic pouch, the Scout salute, and meeting in an elementary school breakroom.

Now we have all but one of the original founding members of Troop 1010 and our daughter Lexie will have her Eagle board of review this weekend.

It’s been a long trip.

We have two other girls closing in on their Eagle rank, with another not far behind. And we’ve added new members, meaning we’ll have one earn her Scout rank at the next court of honor, right on the heels of Lexie earning her Eagle.

It’s been a challenge.

Covid hit, of course, and is still around, making camping and meeting a challenge. But I have to give our troop and leaders credit; they’ve worked awfully hard around restrictions and kept interruptions to a minimum. We did our own home-grown scout camp last summer and are looking to repeat the feat this year. And we only did one virtual campout and I think a month of virtual meetings before we just pulled things together and got it to work.

It's not all been easy. We’ve had to ask for an extension for one of our Scouts – for good reason – and may have to ask for another. We’ve got one who’ll earn her Life rank, but won’t have time for Eagle, and I don’t see an extension working for her. So it’s going like any other troop would, with some motivated, some along for the ride, and most inbetween.

Still, it’s been an enjoyable ride. Here I am nearly a 50-year-old man who’s going to have to do the Hiking merit badge this summer. It’s going to kill me. I’d say cycling didn’t kill me last year, but for the big ride I gave up my bike so the Scoutmaster could be with her scouts after her bike broke. (That was a wild campout to be sure, we stayed in Felt on property owned by Cheryl Siedelman, and slept in tents as 50 mph winds blew on us all night. Yet we survived.

A few interesting things:

1. Both locally and nationally, still fighting against traditionalists who think girls shouldn’t be in BOY scouts. Even among some women, who you’d think would be more sympathetic. Oh well.
2. Dealing with some strong personalities who want to make things challenging. But that’s okay, so far, we’re up to the challenge.
3. I’ve been asked to mentor another all-girl troop in the area. I don’t know why. Probably because I met the minimum requirements: I’m breathing and I said yes. It’ll be fun. We’re already talking with their Scoutmaster about working together anyway.

Here’s to more Scouting. Who knew my life would be like this?

On Chernobyl and Avoiding Our Own Hubris

I have not seen the entirety of HBO's Chernobyl miniseries, but I've had a longtime interest in all things nuclear.

For Christmas, my wife got me a copy of Adam Higginbotham's "Midnight in Chernobyl" which has, thusfar, been a fascinating read.

It's not technical, but technical enough to show Higginbotham did his homework and writes in a clear technical sense of the technology involved. And by dint of doughty research and extensive interviews with survivors, brought together more of an ensemble scale of the massive undertaking that taming the destroyed reactor was.

As HBO admits and I suspected in watching what clips of the miniseries I have watched, the TV show took some liberties, notably making Anatoly Dyatlov more of a villain than he was, and Boris Scherbina and Valery Legasov more of the heroes than they were. The book show many more people were involved in the hubris and bravado that the simplified narrative of the show was able to show (not that I'm knocking the show; it's also great, and had to take some liberties with personalities to make a more coherent story).

NPR does a pretty good interview with Higginbotham (trigger warning: Terry Gross, briefly) here.

Masha Gessen, writing for The New Yorker (for whom Higginbotham also contributes) says this about the show and the real story of Chernobyl, which I think is apt:

More often, however, we are given to believe that the three men who were put on trial—and especially one of them, a particularly unattractive villain by the name of Anatoly Dyatlov (Paul Ritter)—are to blame. We see him strong-arming younger, better men into actions that will ultimately lead to catastrophe. All because, it seems, he wants a promotion. In fact, it wasn’t the carrot of a single promotion, or even several promotions, and it wasn’t one nasty and abusive boss. It was the system, made up primarily of pliant men and women, that cut its own corners, ignored its own precautions, and ultimately blew up its own nuclear reactor for no good reason except that this was how things were done. The viewer is invited to fantasize that, if not for Dyatlov, the better men would have done the right thing and the fatal flaw in the reactor, and the system itself, might have remained latent. This is a lie.

It would be harder to show a system digging its own grave instead of an ambitious, evil man causing the disaster. In the same way, it’s harder to see dozens of scientists looking for clues when you can just create a single fantasy character who will have all the good disaster-fighting traits. This is the great-men (and one woman) narrative of history, where it’s a few steps, a few decisions, made by a few men that matter, rather than the mess that humans make and from which they suffer.

We are, in the West, in the United States, digging our own systematic graves as Gessen describes, where through politics and the tinny universes inside our own heads we become the "pliant men and women" that cuts corners, ignores precautions, and ultimately blows ourselves up because that is the way things are done. The hubris shown in book and show is the hubris I see growing in our own nation, and I don't like it. Which is a very good reason to continue being a student of history. Maybe if enough of us know better, we can reverse the trend.