COMMENTS:
Summer camp sucks period unless its a travel camp. The food is lousy and the people just suck.
Staying home. I lived in the country, and we never went anywhere. All summer long, it was cut down dead trees, chop up firewood, plow the fields, mend fences, etc.
I know and can appreciate just what "cracked_bulb" means here! In the summer of 1953 (during the "Senator Joseph R. McCarthy era" which almost turned the USA into a neo-Nazi police state) when I was 10 going on 11, virtually my entire experiences while at a Boy's Club summer camp turned out to be unpleasant ones. The counselor of our unit was both a pro-McCarthy bully and I believe that he was also gay. Among the unpleasant games he was capable of playing, every time we, as his charges were naked in the shower room, he was also in there with us turning the on-full-blast shower head on each of us as if we were animals being hosed down. At that time, everything at that camp was so carefully governed and controlled by fear that among its other repressive regulations, nobody dared speak out against any of the counselors or he risked punishment by as "little" as being forced to buy the counselor a dime's worth of candy right up to being forced to carry a 10-lb. rock around his waist all day. ( A dime bought a lot of candy in those days!) Every unit at that camp also had its ass-kissing secret informants. Oh yeah, as if to add insult to injury, the food was also crummy! After that unpleasant camping experience ended, we were told by one of the boys in our unit who had an older brother in the Marines that the camp we were in was just like boot camp. There was even a bugler playing "Reville" at 7:00 A.M. every morning and we were always being marched around like military recruits. You're supposed to have fun in summer camp and not the self-serving camp counselors having fun at your expense or the counselors dictating to you, "This is how you will have fun or else!" or "If the Staff says it's fun, you will believe it's fun!" I think you get the overall picture here. Unfortunately, these practices continue to this day even including reports of child molesting, statutory rape and sexual harassment. When I joined the Boy Scouts right after I turned 11, my summer camps with them were far more pleasant than the one with the Boy's Club which, by the way is no more.
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