So you don’t care about basketball. You don’t pray toward the Smith Center five times daily, you don’t get a sense of humble reverence in your heart from reciting the names of UNC point guards into antiquity — and maybe you don’t feel anything toward Duke but a vague antipathy.
For whatever reason, you just don’t buy into the whole “school spirit mob mentality” with its blind enthusiasm and mass fervor. That’s cool, but what makes you think you’re so special?
I know it’s all silly in the grand scheme of things, and I could intellectualize about school spirit as an artificial cultural phenomenon all day if I wanted to be obnoxious, repetitive and cliched — but I’d rather join in the fun.
I might not be able to convince myself that it really matters how many balls we get through hoops, or if our sports can dramatically outmaneuver the other universities’ sports and elevate our sports to the greatest sports ever to have sportsed in regular season play — despite our abysmal sportsing percentage on the sports line.
But I sure can act like I care, and caring is good. In the religious pantheon of college athletics, you could call me a practicing Tar Heel agnostic.
Communities like UNC are the social structures that give our lives shape and meaning, but they’re also fun. They’re filled with people who care about you and have fun affirming their commitment to an abstraction — through and in their caring about you.
Indulging in some healthy school spirit — or whatever your chosen abstraction may be — pulls you out of yourself and your brooding ego. You can’t be unhappy or lonely when you’re not fully aware of your finite individuality!
The passion you each feel and perform for UNC in shouting about free throws translates to compassion for each other as Tar Heels. And as long as the community is a healthy one, your involvement in it reorients you in relation to other communities as well.
Practicing my love for the UNC community and its members builds synaptic bridges of empathy in my mind. It sharpens my sense of fellow-feeling and draws out my social antennae, setting me up to sincerely care my way into any community I see fit to fit myself into.
