When I joined the Ames Police Explorers in eighth grade I had several reasons. First, after my parent’s divorced my mother wanted me to have strong male role models. This meant the Boy Scouts, where the play of Cub Scouts turned to discipline and discipline turned to manhood.
I hated the repetition and mental bluntness of the Boy Scouts. Reciting, marching, standing in neat rows and saluting, sitting through boring meetings in the stagnant air of the Kiwanis’s club and working for merit badges alone with no father to guide, only increased my awareness of the separation Mother wanted the activities to fix..
The Explorers was different. Here was an opportunity, I thought, to really help people. I could learn to be a stabilizing force in an unstable world. I could walk the line between the good guys and the bad guys, and not only that, but I could do it with a gun at my side, itself a symbol of security and enforcement to those whose flaws didn’t contain the taint of criminality.
It was an easy solution in my mind, and it gave me an out with my mother. I could quit the Boy Scouts.