This is an opinion column.

My big brother Mark was an Eagle Scout, and so was our dad, and I think his dad before him. They thought of the outdoors as a classroom and a kind of sanctuary. The Scout motto “Be Prepared” was not just a phrase. It was a discipline.

I felt like an interloper at times. If I had a motto it would have been “uh, just wing it.”

I quit the scouts in the sixth grade to “concentrate on football,” but my last memory of scouting was a miserable campout, a rainy “jamboree” where a bunch of boys I did not know lit bonfires with blowtorches fashioned from Lysol cans and Bic lighters.

I guess they were prepared. I wasn’t.

They danced around those fires, shooting bursts of flaming disinfectant and terrorizing smaller kids. Like “Lord of the Flies” with flamethrowers. It didn’t seem to fit with the vision of scouting I’d been brought up to understand, the one that proclaimed as law that a Scout is: “trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.”

I was never good with obedient, I confess. Or thrifty or reverent or dare I say clean.

But I never went back. I’d been led to believe the institution was based on values I could get behind, even if I couldn’t pull ‘em off. Watching those guys, through today’s eyes, was like watching an insurrection.

I think a lot these days about what we teach our children. About values passed down to us as gospel, as shared aspirations, whether our foreparents lived up to them or not. They came from scouting and clubs and churches and civic groups.

They are so universal, so similar, theological or secular. The Golden Rule. The Ten Commandments. The Girl Scout Law, which requires members to promise: “I will do my best to be honest and fair, friendly and helpful, considerate and caring, courageous and strong, and responsible for what I say and do, and to respect myself and others, respect authority, use resources wisely, make the world a better place, and be a sister to every Girl Scout.”

You’d have a hard time finding someone who’d disagree with those things out loud. Until you turn on the TV.

The 4-H Club pledge declares: “I pledge my head to clearer thinking, my heart to greater loyalty, my hands to larger service, and my health to better living, for my club, my community, my country and my world.”

The Rotary Club’s mottoes include “Service Above Self” and “One Profits Most Who Serves Best.”

The “Six Objects of Kiwanis International” demand among other things that members “give primacy to the human and spiritual rather than to the material values of life,” that they live by the Golden Rule, by high personal and business standards, with righteousness, justice, patriotism and goodwill.

We could go on and on and on. With clubs and institutions and supreme court justices who pledge to “administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich.”

But you get the point. If you look around these days, at social media and their billionaires, at politics and, even at each other sometimes, you’d think our shared values have changed, that a more apt motto for today is less trustworthy and loyal, and more wealthful, trendy, contentious, unkind, belligerent, willful, grifty, craven, mean and militant.

But I guess that depends on us.

I got a note last week from a woman who, troubled by the incendiary nature of these times, vowed to recommit herself to working in organizations she believes represent the best of us. Her sorority. The Scouts.

She made me look around, at Boys and Girls Clubs, at YMCAs, at people in all walks of life who never let chaos outside alter their purpose on the inside.

They are everywhere.

It’s not the flamethrowers who define our values. We still do that. One spark at a time.

John Archibald is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.