School Spirit

So, for all of you impatient people, this blog should be short.
I went to a school basketball game tonight. It was a ton of fun.
Now, I go to a really small private Christian college. I used to go to Texas A&M University, a huge, not-at-all-private-in-fact-they-don't-believe-in-privacy school.
Now, when most people think of A&M, they think of the Aggie tradition. I actually only recently found out what an Aggie is. It's short for Agricultural, which is the A in A&M. M is Mechanical.
Anyways, the traditions of the Aggies are numerous:
- every grade (freshman, sophomore) has it's own cry, which comes from these weird hunting references (whoop!)
- every month there is a big (2,000 people) ceremony to commemorate Aggies who have died in combat
- go to a football game, you'll run into about 500 traditions like yell leaders and the 12th man

And that's just the tip of the iceberg that I learned in just 4 months.

So, I go to this basketball game tonight at my tiny, relatively young school.
We have a couple of cool traditions, for starters. Since it was the first game of the season, we (all 300 students in the crowd) threw toilet paper on the court after we scored our first basket, which happened to be a 3-pointer, thank you very much. It was pretty crazy.
But something interesting happened tonight.
We started a tradition.
Now, it wasn't anything epic; we just made spirit fingers during a free throw for our team, and if we made it, we said, "whoosh!"
But still, the fact that we made a tradition in one night, spontaneously, without any sort of authority or decision by democratic system, is pretty cool.
It's one of the most sought-after human needs to be able to see a visible effect result from our actions. I want to matter. I want to change things. So do you.
I think big, massive, profitable, efficient things like giant schools or Wal-Mart, destroy the human feelings of importance.
It sounds like an obvious thing, but it's different to actually experience it.
I don't know who started that silly tradition, but I hope they feel important. Like they matter.