A Lenten festivus for the rest of us (Daily Tar Heel Opinion Column -- Cries from the Peanut Gallery)

For anyone unaware, we're currently making our way through the Christian season of Lent, a period commonly associated in the popular imagination with affluent suburbanites who nobly commit themselves to exorcising Oreos from their diet for about 40 days each spring.

It's one of those weird niche holidays that seem to exist only parallel to our mass culture -- like Boxing Day, Norwegian Constitution Day and various religious holidays. Also Kwanzaa.

But in the spirit of our long-standing human tradition of cultural co-optation, how about we secularize and assimilate Lent a bit? We don't have to ruin it for practitioners, just make it more accessible.

I'm thinking something along the lines of what secular America has done to Christmas (and what early Christians did to the winter celebration of the birth of the Roman sun god).

And maybe our botched adaptation of Easter can be a cautionary tale. Secular Christmas is a little garish, but it holds onto some useful love and generosity from its sacred equivalent. It's a built-in period for affirming bonds of family and extending goodwill into the world in an intentional way. (Secular Easter is just an opportunity for candy and traumatizing anthropomorphisms.)

Two questions you might be asking: Why draw so heavily on Christian tradition if our nation has so many other traditions? Also: Does America truly need a chance to give up soda or cheese biscuits for a month and a half?

Well if we're going to have a shared culture based on something besides jingoism, self-gratification and Lady Gaga, this is our best bet. And as a nation we don't know enough about any other traditions to adopt them without butchering them.

As for the second question, Lenten sacrifice can be a lot more than just a short-term New Year's resolution. The original tradition is one of sustained fasting (much like strong traditions of fasting in Judaism and Islam), which tends to demand a little more willpower than the still painstaking switch from fried to grilled at KFC.

And many groups today use Lent as a time for reflection on the individual and community level, effectively assessing and reshaping the collective identity of the group to reorient it in relation to the world.

So instead of the individualized self-improvement of New Year's resolutions, Lent can be and often is more about self-discipline and introspection. And who couldn't use a little more of those in their lives?

Let's be honest: we're animals. We're products of our circumstances. Impulse control and critical self-reflection are skills -- just like driving, shooting or caring -- that must be endlessly honed and practiced.

They also happen to be essential for a healthy society, and some regular exercise with them might help mitigate the obesity, political polarization, violence and sexual assault that happen to be systemic in our society.

Worth a try? If I were us, I'd be ready to try anything.


http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/03/a-lenten-festivus-for-the-rest-of-us_0320

In defense of just faking it (Daily Tar Heel Opinion Column Cries from the Peanut Gallery)

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.

Obviously you'll get less out of all this if you secretly don't care, and you might feel awkward for a while, but "agnostic" is actually a fairly misleading term for this -- you're putting so much thought into acting like you care that you can't help but start caring.

You can only sing the alma mater, shout "I'm a Tar Heel" and march to Franklin with people who love you so many times before you start to believe it means something. And as much as I may pretend to be secretly above the groupthink of school spirit, my love for the community runs deep in my Carolina blue blood.

It deepens with every chant, every collective scream at a Wade Moody 3-pointer or Michael Jordan name drop.

It's a good feeling. And in some not insignificant way, I'm a stronger, more compassionate human being for feeling it.

http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/03/in-defense-of-just-faking-it