KINDER'S COMMENTARY: EAGLE SCOUTS HAVE THEIR COMPASS, ROAD MAP IN OLD VERITIES

Twenty-nine years after this writer was in the Sen. Stuart Symington class of Eagle Scouts, called up on the stage at Academic Hall, it was my high privilege yesterday, at the same place, to address such a Court of Honor. This is as high an honor as yours truly has ever received, ranking right up there with being elected twice to the Missouri Senate.

A "Court of Honor." How quaint. In Bill Clinton's America, that is. After having lived through the last year of highly educated people sneering at the very concept, what can we say, of honor, to these fine young men?

We can say that honor endures, must endure, whether or not it is, well, honored. An old saw has it that the Almighty protects fools, drunkards and the United States of America. And so He will, I expect, here. Our country will survive the cynical depradations of the Clintons, and all the measureless damage they have done to America, and to our culture. Still, let there be no doubt: The president and first lady who are constantly telling us that their touchstone is "the children" have, in their shameless clinging to power, fouled the very cultural air those children breathe.

Meanwhile, the Boy Scouts of America, which presented to this president their highest award for character a couple of years ago, is left to its lonely and honorable -- and all the more honorable because lonely -- task. That task is to uphold, against the sneering of every cynic, the timeless virtues -- what one author called "The Permanent Things." A Scout, says the Scout Law, is 12 things: "Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean and Reverent."

It will be for you, and for history, to ponder how many of those describe today's commander-in-chief. But to the Scouts in yesterday's class, I said that while over time the Almighty usually does protect us Americans in this fashion, it won't always be so. That is to say, the time will come again, in each of their lives, when each will be tested. And, they should know, that at some critical hour in our national life Americans will look around for leaders who care more about principle than about hanging onto power, who are quite prepared to lose their offices, their property -- their very "lives, fortunes and sacred honor," in another quaint phrase -- rather than give in to "the low arts of popularity," in Founder James Madison's telling phrase.

And that when that time of testing comes, as come it will, they as individuals, and we as a nation blessed by God, will prosper insofar as we are guided by the 12 points of the Scout Law and by the tenets of the Scout Oath: "On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country, to obey the Scout Law, to help other people at all times, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight."

In the lives of great nations there is always an ebb and flow. America, the great and immensely strong continental nation, hasn't seemed to need these great virtues in the Era of Clinton, and has, in the main, done swimmingly without them in its chief executive. But need them we will again, and, I am certain, during the lifetimes of those Eagle Scouts.

When that time of testing comes, I said yesterday, those young men have already been given their road map, their compass, their North Star by which to navigate.

Those guideposts are from their experience in Scouting, and not from any lesson taught by the Bad Example in the White House -- the peerless master, you might say, of Madison's "low arts of popularity."

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.