Bsa Toten Chip Requirements

MC 2000

Eagle Scout Court of Honor acceptance speech delivered by Patrick Morey

The following is an inspiring example of how young people still find their identity in Scouting. This is a transcript of an Eagle Scout Court of Honor acceptance speech delivered by Patrick Morey, 18, who recently graduated from Medford High School and is headed to Ithaca College, majoring in English. His Eagle project was clearing trash and debris from a ...

The following is an inspiring example of how young people still find their identity in Scouting. This is a transcript of an Eagle Scout Court of Honor acceptance speech delivered by Patrick Morey, 18, who recently graduated from Medford High School and is headed to Ithaca College, majoring in English. His Eagle project was clearing trash and debris from a choked fire access road in woods near the high school. The road is now accessible not only to emergency vehicles but has attracted hikers. It was a perfect example of the new environmentalism advocated by noted authors such as Richard Louv, (Last Child in the Woods and The Nature Principle), who say that caring for the outdoors is not just hiking in a national park but by bringing nature back to cities and suburbs.

Morey, a member of Troop 416 in Medford, wrote that for years, he was so embarrassed to be a Scout that "I split myself into a school-filtered Patrick and a scout Patrick and promised that one would not betray the other." But it was the years of canoeing, hiking and building things in the Scouts that gave him "hope, courage, confidence and. . .identity," in a world where "the scouting program and I have become so intertwined that it's impossible to discern where the input of one created the product of another."

There are seven years between me and the beginning of this path, seven years of work, frustration, experience, excitement, and boredom. In these seven years, I have spent hour after hour roaming the woods, I have canoed for fifty miles, I have learned to build a fire and work with others. But above all, better than any lesson taught in scouts, I have discovered something I can claim to be truly and inarguably meaningful.