We Need Parades

Parades were always a part of my life as a young child and I can still remember my mother taking me to every holiday parade there was on the wide avenue that stood just at the foot of a very steep hill in our town. I'd sit on the curb and watch as the uniformed men from the police, fire and military marched by with their bands and bagpipes. Then there'd be the veterans of all those wars in their uniforms or, if the uniform didn't still fit, wearing their ribbons and hats from the local Veterans of Foreign War unit.

The schools would sometimes march and we'd get to see talented marching bands interspersed with huge banners and it would, many times, bring a tear to my eye. I was so filled with emotion watching those parades that it just all welled up and a few tears would fall down my cheeks. Despite the tears, I loved it and I loved my mother for taking me to these celebrations of life and of community.

Structure is something that provides a sense of security in our lives and, for some, it is more necessary for maintaining focus and hope. We send children to structured schools where the curriculum and the uniforms indicate they are places of learning not just of class lessons, but lessons in life and appropriate behavior.

Parades produce that sense of structure in our lives, albeit a physical display of structure only once a year. They are, therefore, something for which we all eagerly await. In New York, it's the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade with its enormous balloons that never fail to dazzle and in New Orleans it's Mardi Gras. Each city has known its own heartache. New York had its 9/11 and The Big Easy was hit by Hurricane Katrina. Both cities needed to hang on to their traditional parades, but New Orleans may have a harder time than New York.

What value is there in a parade, you may ask. It's just foolishness and money that could have been better spent on food or medicine or housing for the homeless, but the necessities of life aren't always enough to help us survive.

I recall a very famous study that was done in upper New York State just after WWII. Rene Spitz looked at infant mortality in orphanages and, although the children were cared for in terms of food, medicine and a clean living environment, they had a very high mortality rate. This was especially true in the very young.

Why was this, Spitz asked himself. What was the one thing missing here that could save them? He found it was love, a sense of bonding and physically touching other human beings. So, parades seem to me to provide that social glue that helps all of us survive the day-to-day cares of the world. Fun, frivolity and laughing are just as important as food, medicine and a home.

Beneath the frivolity of parades is a very real life necessity, but who would have thought that?

Related Topics: Beat Holiday Stress, Blow Off Post-Holiday Blues

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