Volunteer Rules

My daughter is a volunteer Girl Scout Troop leader. She says that the G.S. Council doesn’t have a lot of rules for the volunteers, but the one they really impress upon them is that they are NEVER to talk to the press. If something happens, let the Girl Scout Council’s media person talk to the press. Seems like an interesting rule, but its importance was made apparent to me last night when I was alerted to the fact that there was an article about the Point Roberts Community Council in the Bellingham Herald.

The Herald is the daily paper in Bellingham, the seat of Whatcom County, the county that houses Point Roberts and administers most of such governance as we get. Well, a little publicity never hurt anybody, right? Except, the front-page (on the Net, anyway) article focused on the idea that Point Roberts is very distressed by the nature of its relationship to the county and the residents are talking about seceding from the county, the state, the world, maybe, and that the Community Council is a venue for discussing this, maybe making it happen. The article was accompanied, at the time I read it, by 26 comments, most of which felt that selling us to Canada would be the best thing that could happen to Whatcom County and that we were a community of whiners and foreigners, so who cared what we thought or what happened to us.

Ah, I thought, that article is definitely not accurate and certainly not helpful. And it was even more not helpful that the only two people from Point Roberts who had been interviewed for the story were people involved in the formation of the Community Council, with the vague implication that they were speaking on behalf of the Council and endorsing secession. If only the Point Roberts Community Council were as smart as the Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Girl Scouts Council we’d have had a rule that prohibited any of us from talking to the press.

Perhaps we should tell the Herald that the only act the P.R. Community Council has so far set in motion is to redesign, rebuild, and landscape the Community Events sign. Surely not the act of a lot of secessionist hotheads? Or maybe that’s where hotheads do start if they don’t have Fort Sumter to work with? I’m invoking the rule for myself: no volunteers speaking to the press on behalf of the Community Council. But there's a lot of talking among ourselves about the article: unhappily, it was, last night, the #1 'most emailed article' in the Herald.