I don’t know whether it was my upbringing or my genes, but I’ve just never really gotten into team spirit. I can play on a team, participate in a team’s activities, and even earnestly collaborate with my teammates toward a mutually beneficial goal. But ask me to root, root root for the home team, and you can bet I’m going to be yawning in between asking why I should bother.
I remember being in a freshman high school assembly and being taught about how to show my school spirit. Three hundred of us were coaxed and cajoled into screaming at certain cues, and a good number of the kids really seemed to get into it. But a contingent of senior classmen was there, and even despite their smaller numbers, they were louder. Oh noes, we had to beat them, how could we let them beat us??!!
I distinctly remember thinking “but what’s the point,” to myself as I stood in the bleachers with my comrades. Yes, yes, the seniors were louder, but how did it matter? What if they did love our school more, what then? What was the point of school spirit? Did it get me better grades, less homework, or out of school an extra period early? How did my allegiance to something I had no part in choosing for myself benefit me at all? Was I really supposed to be bloated with school pride just because it was the one I went to, and not based on its merits?
This internal dialogue has echoed in my thoughts time and again, and has informed many of my decisions. Religion, military service, and any significant sort of plebian nationalism have all been considered and dismissed. Autonomically doing as god says without personally talking to it, sacrificing my life for an economic system, and accepting the poor choices of my government without comment seem like foolish and dangerous paths to choose. Especially when the merits are dubious, at best.
But faced with these same choices, so many people still seem particularly eager to show their school spirit. Sometimes I feel like I’m still standing next to them in our high school auditorium looking at them, shaking my head, and wondering “why?”
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When forced to attend the mandatory pep rallies before high school football games, my crew of misfits would cheer for arch rival Stonington, going so far as to bring a banner reading:(our home team)Bulldogs Bite It! That was quickly quashed.
We then shifted gears, buying blue and white pom poms from the omnipresent and relentlessly upbeat Pep Squad, the brown shirts and storm troopers of Team Spirit. We carried them at all times, cheering for our Bulldogs obsessively at any and all opportunities - in the cafeteria, study halls and corridors - each impromtu rally more maniacal and ridiculously overblown than the last.
The head (actual) cheerleader confronted me, sneering, "I don't think you're very funny." I responded with "Gimme a B!", and sweeping arm gestures forming that letter. "You know, you get out of high school what you put into it." was her response. I asked her if she'd gotten that line from the same folks who'd wholesaled her the pom poms, and that if she had, that she should take it back and get a better one.
Ah memories, yes.
There's an undeniable power behind an earnest chanting. You may have not have felt it at school, but perhaps at a concert?
There is a power that emerges from a large number of people focused on a given thing.
For myself, I have felt this at Catholic Mass as a boy, at professional football games, at concerts and most especially, being part of the applause and "standing-o" at the end of a play or musical in a theater.
Some people take from this power in order to feel a high; some are enchanted; some feel small, and wish to know at least they were *part* of something bigger.
Poss(ums), you have no need of a power supplied by others. Enchantment brings rewards, however.
Something to ponder (he said, ponderously)
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