Yesterday, I was thinking about advice I was given that suggested I do something difficult every day. The assumed goal is to build character and to understand ourselves better.
While there are many difficult things we can do, boot camp is especially difficult. Friends who attended told me their stories of boot camp and what they experienced there as they progressed from raw recruit to soldier. Stories weren’t as bad as what the media shows, but they weren’t great…but they all said they were changed for the better after weeks spent in the basic training boot camp.
What strikes me, though, are the many “boot camps” that appear in the public space. You can find them anyplace you look. If you search for the term on Google you will get a reasonably infinite number of links to boot camps of all kinds.
The most common are the extreme workout sessions that advertise that they will get you as fit as a new Marine. There are also bridal boot camps for weight loss, teen boot camps for kids in trouble with the police, drug treatment boot camps, bible boot camps, computer programming boot camps, MBA degree accelerated boot camps, and..well, there are as many kinds of boot camps as there are things to learn or do.
This got me thinking about questions that I can’t answer:
1) Are these boot camps good for us? Or are they a variation on the quick-fix mentality by pretending that attending a short boot camp will suddenly give a person the amazing physique, knowledge or whatever the boot camp promises?
2) Why the boot camp metaphor? Is it just a handy metaphor given the last decade of U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan? Does it show some greater cultural angst and by going to a boot camp, we somehow feel connected or in control while these conflicts are in progress?
3) Recruits in boot camp have very little control over their destiny. The boot camp image in movies and television show nearly brutal experiences where recruits are pushed to their limits and they rarely look back fondly on the experience. Given this, why would anybody be attracted to a situation that claims a connection with that mythos?
4) How do the people who connect the phrase “boot camp” with completely unrelated topics like “bible study” or “computer programming” or “dog training” get this idea that these things are similar in any way to the real thing?
5) Why don’t people laugh at how often this term is used, especially in corporate culture? (Raise your hand if you’ve had to attend a “boot camp” at your work that pretended to teach you something important in one day or less.)
Anyhow…yeah. Boot camps that aren’t boot camp. What the heck?
{ 1 comment }
