I have been fortunate enough to a be a pilot for many years, and I am also an Aviation merit badge counselor.  Pilots are always learning (a pilot’s first license is often called “a license to learn.”)  One of my absolute favorite aviation instructors is Rod Machado.  He is a noted and popular flight instructor, and he talks about developing an aviation code of ethics in “Samurai Airmanship: Bushido – Developing An Aviation Code Of Ethics.” 

I believe his discussion can easily be used to describe the Scout Oath and Law.  In the case of aviation, people’s lives may depend on the pilot honoring his code.  As you read how Mr. Machado tells a story of  Bushido, the samurai code of ethics, think about how you might apply it to the Scout Oath and Law.

“Miyamoto Musashi, one of the greatest samurai swordsman of feudal Japan, approached his assailant–an enemy of the emperor. Unsheathing his sword, he inched toward his foe, ready for the brief but deadly encounter. Suddenly, the assailant spat in Musashi’s face. Composed, yet stunned, Musashi resheathed his sword, calmly turned and walked away. The moment spittle hit his face he felt rage. But the samurai never take a life in anger. It is against their Bushido.

Bushido means “code of ethics.” The Samurai lived by such a code and many people still do. It delineates acceptable and unacceptable behaviors. It emphasizes what is valued most and prevents these values from extinguishing with time. It is a personal code of conduct, allowing individuals to survive, to thrive, to find meaning in their existence. Pilots, without such a Bushido, are unlikely to do any of these.

Over the years I’ve come across several pilots that stand out in my memory. Each had one thing in common: they conducted themselves by an aviation code of ethics. They knew what was safe to do and what was an unacceptable risk. These were aviators of strong conviction, refusing to breach their self-imposed limits and violate their personal code of conduct. When frequently spat upon by the enemy’s of safety–peer pressure, ego, pride–they followed their Bushido. In short, they were the safest of pilots.”

Bushido is an attitude.  You are announcing to the world, “This is who I am.  This is what I believe.  Don’t ask me to bend my code.”  To paraphrase Mr. Machado, the Scout Oath and Law is our personal code of conduct, allowing us to survive, to thrive, to find meaning in our existence.  With your right arm upraised into a 90 degree angle, you probably say this code aloud at your troop meeting every week.  We know it by heart.  But can we allow that code to so penetrate our heart that any violation is totally unacceptable?  Like the samurai who refused to fight in anger, can we also refuse to violate the oath we have taken for our own?

Are we trustworthy in all matters?  Friendly to all?  Kind?  Reverent toward the world around us?  Are we helping people at all times?  This should be true of all Scouts, but most particularly Eagle Scouts.  In your Eagle Court of Honor, you will end your public pledge with, “To this I pledge my sacred honor,” the same words used by the signers of the Declaration of Independence.  This is who an Eagle Scout is.  This is our Bushido.

For Citizenship in the Community, one of your Eagle-required merit badges, you must watch a movie that shows how the actions of one individual or group of individuals can have a positive effect on a community.  Why do you think this a requirement of this merit badge?  Certainly one of the reasons is to demonstrate that YOU could be the one person that makes a difference in a big way!   All throughout history, over and over again, major changes for the better have been the dream and the inspiration of a single person, or a small group of people.

The photograph above is from the movie, Ghandi, starring Ben Kingsley.  Employing non-violent civil disobedience, Gandhi led India to independence and inspired movements for non-violence, civil rights, and freedom across the world.  Even if you do not become a world-wide figure like Mahatma Ghandi, your individual actions can have an unbelievable ripple effect, as you affect others around you, and they, in turn, affect others around them.

As an Eagle Coach, merit badge counselor, and Assistant Scoutmaster, I know I am having a positive effect on young men.  I am not sure when and where that effect will occur, and I may never know, but nevertheless, I know it will be there!

You can download a list of movies that I approve as a merit badge counselor on the download page of this website.  The requirement states very specifically that you must have permission to watch the movies from your parents (or guardians) and your merit badge counselor.   So please get permission from both before you watch the movie.

Enjoy the show, and as you watch it, imagine yourself in a similar role.  What would you do differently?  Is there a way you can make a positive change in the world around you in a similar way?  Please discuss this with your counselor and parents.

The following is from Bryan on Scouting, the blog for adult Scouting leaders, at blog.scoutingmagazine.org/.

“With apologies to the ubiquitous convenience store chain, more Eagle Scout projects went up last year alone than the total number of 7-Elevens currently open worldwide.

Yes, the number of 2012 Eagle Scout projects bested the number of worldwide 7-Elevens by a score of 57,976 to 50,250.

I bring up this incongruous comparison to remind you that there’s an Eagle Scout project on every corner. There’s probably one within walking distance from you right now. Think about the scale of this for a second: Some 50,000 new Eagle Scout projects are completed each year. That’s roughly 137 significant improvements to the community every day, improvements created by the best, brightest, and most-prepared leaders around.

The Eagle Scout Service Project is a remarkably powerful force that’s transforming our country for the better each time a city park, church, or school gets repaired and beautified.”

To carry Bryan’s calculations a little further, in my experience a typical Eagle project requires a 150 man-hours of service from the Eagle Scout candidate and his volunteers.  Multiply that by 50,000 Eagle Projects a year, and you end up with a staggering 7.5 million service hours.  Scouts, you are making a difference and you are part of this huge contribution to our communities and country!  Thank you!

What’s the best way to find a service project for your Eagle Scout advancement?  Well, I have some specific suggestions, but first let’s discuss the purpose of the service project, and what you need to demonstrate to your Eagle Board of Review.  The project is designed for an Eagle candidate to show his ability to conceptualize a task, describe its benefits, prepare a proposal that meets approval from four different parties, fully plan out the work to be done (including material, tool, and supply lists), raise funds as necessary, implement the project, and finally, issue a report on the project and results (which is approved by both the beneficiary and unit leader.)

As a member of a District Advancement Committee, I work with Eagle candidates continuously and spend a lot of time helping them develop their projects.  I tell them that the three most important things to demonstrate in the project are:

(1) Leadership (2)  Leadership and (3) Leadership.

What does leadership mean?  It means that the Scout is actively coordinating and directing all phases of the project, and takes full responsibility for the project and results. There is a reason that most branches of the US military will advance an Eagle Scout one full pay grade when he joins, and this is it.  Most young people will not have this kind of life experience until their twenties.  As an Eagle candidate, you will be learning and demonstrating your leadership capabilities as adolescent!

It is not only permissible to receive help from others, it is necessary.  In an excellent service project, it is not unusual for the Scout’s volunteers to contribute at least three times as many hours as the Scout himself.  However, there is no set number of hours that must be achieved.  I tell Scouts that the project must be difficult enough that it “cannot be completed by you and your dad on a Saturday afternoon, but not so difficult that you will be overwhelmed by the project.”

So, how do you find a project?  I always prefer to see a Scout tackle a project that he is passionate about.  So, that is the best starting point.  Is there a not-for-profit cause, organization or project that excites you?  There are two Eagle projects that I coached in the last several years that are a great illustration of how a Scout’s passion propelled the project forward.  One was a project that involved providing clothing and meals to the homeless (the Scout even built a website and made a presentation to two other troops to promote his project.)  The second was a project that involved a local Veteran’s Hospital, where the Scout’s mother had worked during the Scout’s entire childhood.  The Scout had massive response from the veteran’s as he interviewed them for their stories of military service.  At the conclusion of the project, I literally had tears in my eyes as veteran after veteran told him how meaningful the project was in their lives.

Many years ago, in 1967, my own Eagle Service project was providing a new activity room ceiling in a school for retarded children.  My youngest brother had Down Syndrome and attended the school, and my mom was a volunteer.  I was highly motivated to do the project, and make it come out right!

Some other ideas:  Start with the people you know.  Ask your school principal or assistant principal for ideas.  Likewise, ask at your house of worship.  Is your family involved with causes that might need a project?  Local conservation areas and parks are another possibility for projects.  And let us not forget your Scoutmaster or District representative.  If you are coming up dry, this is a question that they have heard before!

And then there are some truly innovative projects.  The National Eagle Scout Association (NESA) has some of these projects documented on their website at http://www.nesa.org/projects.html.  Perhaps your project will be among them some day!

When I meet with a Scout to discuss a potential Eagle Scout Service Project for the first time, I usually say, “No one expects that you know how to do this.”  It would be a most unusual adolescent who knew how conceive of an Eagle Project, write up a plan to the last detail, recruit all his volunteers, raise the necessary funds, implement the project and write up a final report without assistance.

Last year, the Boy Scouts of America officially recognized the position of Eagle Scout Coach.  Scouts, I highly recommend that you connect with an approved Eagle Coach before you start your project.  In many troops, this is a role served by an Assistant Scoutmaster.  There are also coaches that work on the District level.

“Coach” is the perfect description of the job.  Like a football coach, he can provide wisdom and help you with your game plan, but he cannot get out on the field on game day!   You must do the work, but a good coach will make sure that you don’t get sidetracked and will help you keep focused on what has to be done.  As an example, for the final report, you must report the hours that you and your volunteers spent on the project.  At your first meeting, a good coach will get you started on a project log, or other recording mechanism, to make sure that you are tracking your hours accurately.

Start with your Scoutmaster, who probably has great familiarity with the process of rank advancement from Life to Eagle!  If you troop does not have an Eagle Coach, you can contact either your District Advancement Chairman, or your Council office to locate an approved Eagle Coach.  You want to be sure that your Eagle Coach has been officially approved for the position within your District, since your Eagle Service Project Workbook will contain both his name and his comments.

Since an Eagle Service Project often takes a year or more to complete for many boys, I highly recommend that you start the process immediately after achieving Life rank.  If feasible, I also encourage Scouts to try to finish their project and achieve Eagle Scout Rank before entering the 11th grade.   (That is a time in your life that will start to get very busy, with a lot of activities competing for your time.)

So your very first task for your Eagle Scout Service Project is to find yourself an Eagle Coach!  It will save you much time and effort in the long run.

I felt a real sadness when Eagle Scout Neil Armstrong died a few days ago.  My own Scouting career coincided with the “space race” decade of the 1960’s, and I lived in Huntsville, Alabama, home of the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center.  To me, Neil Armstrong was the epitome of what it is to be an Eagle Scout.  I would like to pass along the following story of a Scout who persuades Mr. Armstrong to become his Space Exploration merit badge counselor.   The story, “My Moon Shot”, speaks volumes about Neil Armstrong’s grace and humility.

http://www.americanheritage.com/content/my-moon-shot

As an Eagle Coach, I am concerned with helping young men attain Eagle Scout rank.  But I am actually more concerned with helping them establish a good base for launching themselves into the business of leading a productive life as an adult.  To help achieve that objective, there are two no more important merit badges than Personal Fitness and Personal Management.  These are the cornerstones of living a full life in accordance with the Scout Law and Oath.  If we cannot take care of ourselves, how are we to take care of others?

Almost everyone has been on an airplane flight, where a flight attendant demonstrates the correct use of an oxygen mask in the event of cabin depressurization.   Their instructions  to put your own mask on first, and then the masks of children, sounds counter-intuitive.  But the logic is sound:  If you pass out, how are you going to help your children?

Likewise, if you cannot get your own act together, how are you going to fulfill that part of our oath that says you will help other people at all times?  Personal Fitness and Personal Management give you the tools to do just that.  Scouts, as you complete these merit badges on your Eagle trail, try to go beyond the letter of the requirements and ask yourself how you can implement what you are learning into your life today, as well as the rest of your life.

Both of these merit badges are best taken later in your Scout career, as you get closer to a life beyond living with your parents or guardians.  And here’s a shortcut:  If you complete your Eagle Service Project proposal before you start Personal Management, your merit badge counselor can count it as fulfillment of requirement # 9, a project on paper.  One of those cases where your work can count twice!

Michael Malone: A Century of Eagle Scouts

The Eagles’ service project is the single greatest youth-service initiative in history, and one that has touched every community in America in an important way.

By Michael S. Malone

Mr. Malone, a veteran journalist and Eagle Scout, is the author of a new history of Eagle Scouting, “Four Percent” (WindRush Publishing, 2012).

A version of this article appeared August 1, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Century of Eagle Scouts.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303933704577533561616246168.html

One hundred years ago on Aug. 1, Arthur Eldred, a 17-year-old Boy Scout from Long Island, became the first person to earn the Eagle Scout rank. Eldred, tall, quiet and with a shock of dark hair, had joined scouting largely at the behest of his widowed mother, who hoped it would give some structure to his life. Yet as Eagle Scouts would continue to do throughout the next century, Eldred caught the scouting world by surprise. He was the first of an extraordinary new cohort of young men who were to prove very different from the classic 13-year-old Boy Scout in short pants.

Eldred’s initial accomplishment was to complete the requirements for the rank of Eagle Scout only six months after that supreme award in American scouting was announced in April 1912. The leaders of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), assuming it would take several years for any boy to earn the required 21 merit badges, hadn’t yet devised a final review system for Eagle candidates; they hadn’t even settled on a design for the medal.

Unsure how to proceed after Eldred qualified for all the badges, the BSA ordered him to come down to its headquarters in Manhattan and put him through what had to be the most intimidating board of review in scouting history—led by the BSA’s founders themselves. Eldred apparently passed with ease. And then, as an indication of what kind of remarkable person scouting would now have, while awaiting his award that summer Eldred saved two of his fellow Scouts from drowning.

Out of the more than 115 million boys who have passed through the Boy Scouts of America in the last 102 years, approximately two million have become Eagle Scouts, a 2% rate that has climbed to about 4% of all scouts in recent years. Some may have excelled in outdoor challenges and troop leadership, or while earning merit badges for oceanography and entrepreneurship. Yet all have been changed by the experience of what has been come to be called “the Ph.D. of Boyhood.” And these Eagles in turn have changed the face of American culture in ways both obvious and unexpected.

Many went on to notable careers and distinguished service to the country. The list of famous Eagles over the last century includes movie and television stars, six Medal of Honor recipients, Nobel Prize winners, novelists, a number of astronauts (including most Shuttle astronauts), Tuskegee airmen and Japanese-American internees, congressmen, senators and governors, an endless number of corporate CEOs and university presidents, a U.S. president (Gerald Ford), and the first man to walk on the moon (Neil Armstrong). But there are other, perhaps less obvious, Eagles as well: sexologist Alfred Kinsley, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and Washington’s disgraced ex-mayor Marion Barry.

Two summers ago, during the BSA centennial parade in Washington, D.C., the adult Eagle contingent of official marchers featured a diplomat, a journalist, military officers, a bomb-demolition expert, doctors and a department-store Santa Claus. Despite what you might think, America’s Eagles are spread across the political spectrum. They include individuals across all races (scouting was officially integrated from the start) who hold beliefs as diverse as other Americans. What they have in common is that they chose a life of achievement and assumed leadership roles at a very young age.

Scouting as a whole has regularly (and falsely) suffered the indignities of various stereotypes: the ardent escorts of little old ladies crossing the street, the secret paramilitary militia, the synecdoche of all things reactionary.

Yet the image of Eagle Scouts has only risen over the decades in American life and culture—Indiana Jones, like Steven Spielberg, is an Eagle Scout, and so is Will Smith’s character in “Men in Black.” It is as close to a gold standard of youth as we have, which is why it is regularly noted in the obituaries of octogenarians alongside a lifetime list of other achievements.

And that reputation is deserved. A recent Gallup survey (for Baylor University) of Eagle Scouts, former Boy Scouts and men who never joined scouting found that America’s Eagles are far more engaged with the world around them in almost every way—in community service, club membership, churchgoing, outdoor recreation, and the fields of education and health.

Eagle Scouting’s biggest contribution to American life is the one most recognized: the service project, the “dissertation” of the boyhood Ph.D. Since the mid-1960s, all Eagle candidates are required, beyond earning the traditional 21 merit badges, to devise, plan, execute and manage a community-service project.

Most of these projects are small: a new bench at the park, painting a school building, collecting blankets for a homeless shelter. But some are hugely ambitious: restoring wetlands, building a library in Africa or a playground at a Russian orphanage, creating an artificial reef—and they consume thousands of hours.

You cannot read a small-town newspaper in America without running across the story of an Eagle service project at least once a month. But it was only recently that the National Eagle Scout Association decided to look beyond the anecdotal and tally up all of the Eagle service projects ever done. It came to the jaw-dropping total of more than 100 million hours of service. Eagle Scouts are adding more than three million more hours each year.

Those numbers likely make the Eagle Scout service project the single greatest youth service initiative in history, and one that has touched every community in America in an important way.

Scouts, as you work on your project you are going to interact with many people.  That is one of the major objectives of the Eagle Service Project – for you to demonstrate leadership and your ability to work with people.  EVERYONE will take you more seriously when you wear your uniform.  As you will discover when you become an Eagle Scout, the accomplishment is nearly universally admired.  When you are in uniform, people will go out of their way to help you (and in the process usually tell you stories about their son, brother or father who became an Eagle Scout, or just missed!)

I can tell you that as an Eagle Coach and merit badge counselor, I know that I have a serious and motivated Scout when he comes to a meeting with me dressed in his Scout uniform.  I like to work with serious and motivated people, and will usually go the extra mile to assist them.  That is just human nature. Doors will open for you when you appear in uniform with your Eagle Scout Service Project proposal in hand!

So put this tool to work for you in all your Eagle Service project meetings, especially those meetings where you are asking for help or donations!  You don’t need to wear your merit badge sash or every last patch, but your uniform should be neat and clean, shirt tucked in, with presentable shoes.  As a future Eagle Scout, you are taking pride in who your are and what you stand for.  The Scout uniform demonstrates that to the world.