The War on Fun Continues: Local Cops Crackdown on My Kid's Boy Scout Troop's Model Rocket Day

I’ve got a 6th grader who’s into Scouting.  It’s a great thing for him; the people who run it are sincere, earnest guys, the kids are all decent and the parents are cool.  Plus they’re big on putting together funtivities that get the boys away from the TVs, computer screens and Wiis and it’s an absolute good.  Yesterday was this annual deal where they have a cookout down at the town ballfields (which are empty) and the kids launch model rockets.  If you’re not familiar, they’re these kits you buy at craft/hobby stores where the rockets are cardboard and plastic.  You load an engine into that’s about the size of a shotgun shell, you fire them off, they go up a few hundred feet, a chute deploys and they fall to the ground.  As wholesome, harmless kid activities go, this one is about the wholesomest, harmlessest you can imagine.  Like something kids back in the 1950s did while wearing coonskin caps and Chuck Taylor sneakers.

But this isn’t the 1950s.  As we soon found out, when the cops came to bust it up, saying somebody complained.  Now bear in mind, this wasn’t in a neighborhood.  This field is massive.  Wide enough for at least three football fields and long enough for four or five.  You can’t even see a house from there.  But someone called to bitch about… I don’t know what.  These things don’t explode.  The just Pffffft.  Like the sound a bottle rocket makes, minus the fun explosiony part.  But they did.  So a police cruiser came rolling into a parking lot filled with kids, parents, a big UHaul-type trailer with the Scout logo on the side, a gas grill and tables to tell everyone to break it up.  Over the loudspeaker.  The same loudspeaker they use to yell at rioters that they have to disburse or they’ll be fired upon or whatever.  The Scoutmaster explained to the cop that they do this every year and that he had cleared it with the town, but to no avail.  The cop said someone complained and that was that.

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Oddly enough I’m not blaming the cops, since I know a lot of them and we’ve got a great department.  My beef isn’t with the police; it’s with the Fun Police.  Just like with the Scituate PD a year ago cracking down on 4th of July bonfires on the beach, this is another example of the world catering to these wretched, miserable, sanctimonious shitheads who (HL Mencken’s words) live in mortal fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time.  It’s like we’ve fallen asleep at the switch and let the biggest social misfits among us take over and now they’re running the world.  The cops are afraid to say “Really lady?  Boy Scouts are playing with science toys at 6 o’clock at night and you’re calling us about it?  Why don’t you lighten the fuck up and let us worry about catching real criminals” because they might get sued.  So instead, we cater to the .01% of the biggest losers and nutjobs among us, instead of telling them to go piss up a rope like a sane society should.

So you can rest easy, citizens of the South Shore.  That criminal organization known as The Boy Scouts has been thwarted and threat from those Weapons of Mass Destruction they call “Model Rockets” has been neutralized.  Congratulations.  You’re safe in your homes once again.  Now the cops can turn their attention to the next threat: Those girls who peddle cookies on street corners.  End of rant.  @JerryThornton1