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I'm a 501st member as well, serving as event coordinator for the Belgian Garrison for 2 years now. Started membership in 2002.
This response you got is indeed very shameful. This is not how we handle things in my Garrison. The result is that we are very succesful, with a lot of event requests, which is both good ànd bad.
Good is, we get to troop a lot. Meet new people. Get praise for what we do, etc...
Bad is, that the more praise we get, the more jealousy it generates with people from surrounding groups. Although this is just a minority, it's these folks who thoroughly sicken up everybody else. The 501st has become an elite pool of "favoritism" in a lot of ways and the response you got reflects that all too well.
The groups or individuals who do not wish to fall subject to it, may get slapped on the wrist for "not participating in the census enough", or "tampering witht the elections" or "wearing the wrong kind of bodyglove in the wrong places" or whatever other stupid reason they may think of.
Personally, I'd very much like to see the 501st return to its earlier years; scrapping a whole bunch of charter amendments instead of adding them. This happens with other groups as well, but indeed the 501st tops the lot with the "we're elite" attitude.
Personally, we've had run-ins with the Rebel Legion which ultimately caused the 30 people of our Belgian base to collectively leave the RL. Basically, RL-staff lost track of our base somehow and some local guy who found this out, took advantage of this to have himself appointed as CO of the new Benelux base, without informing the Belgians who've been RL members for years, of these new elections. Imagine all of our surprises when suddenly, in October, therefore 2 months before any official elections, we got a message: "Hey, I'm your new CO."
RL command wouldn't listen to us at all, when we pointed this out and it took a long and heated discussion before they admitted they had simply forgotten us, not explaining how this could be possible and not making any attempt to rectify the mistake on their end.
So we upped and left, making our base independent under the name of Crescent Moon Alliance.
On CE, we were ominously present as the Belgian 501st Garrison ànd the Crescent Moon Alliance, much to the dislike of the new base's CO. Since then, he's made quite a few indirect attacks on us, even sending e-mails to the Belgian tax office, claiming we ask for 1000 Euros per person when trooping on an event.
(in case you were wondering: when the tax investigator came to inspect us, it took her 5 minutes to dismiss the complaint, as we are officially recognised by the Belgian state as a Non-Profit Organisation. Belgian NPO's mandatorily have their bookkeeping checked annually by the government anyway, so if we woùld charge any money at all for trooping, they'd find out pretty fast).
But all that doesn't mean any of our people dislike the RL as a whole. We still have many good contacts there. Most RL-members who hear our story think it's a disgrace this happened. It's useless to hold the entire RL responsible for the actions of the current Benelux CO and last year's RL staff.
But we're happy as independent CMA. It functions pretty much like this online community does, only with more chance to see each other, have workshops, events together. There's no charter and no rules to abide to, other than "Behave yourself and have fun".
No elite behaviour, no favoritism, no selfishness. That is what our group tries to achieve.
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