T's For Tradition!

ED: With apologies to any black, Jewish, or Catholic Cup readers.  We love you, and you know it.  Also, read this to yourself in a voice which suggests an extremely naïve optimism.

You know, at Ole Miss, we love our traditions.  And we love them stubbornly so, to boot!  Even when these traditions may be damaging to our image, despite our best intentions, we still cling to them.  This is because many of us see these traditions as a part of our identity, or even as part of some greater Southern identity at large.  As such, we see any sort of movement towards the ending of these traditions as being an attack on this identity; attacks which are, as we perceive them, driven by folks who are misguided about Southern people, traditions, and history.

So, in an effort to lift this onus off of our collective backs, a few of us at the Cup along with some of the best friends and Ole Miss supporters we know, have come up with a whole new tradition which, we assure you, is something which we can all get behind and support for the betterment of Ole Miss!

Tradition.  The very word itself invokes all kinds of mental images and contexts, all of which are undoubtedly fantastic and worthy of celebration and reverence for the individual conjuring them.  But, in a lot of instances, other folks are offended by the traditions we Rebels love, despite how much we harmlessly love to celebrate them.  How can we avoid this conundrum?

Simple, we celebrate the idea of tradition itself!  We won't need to specify any particular tradition to do this.  We will simply need to acknowledge our traditional nature and our desire to remain as such; that's all!

I propose that, in order to really get behind the celebration of tradition, we celebrate the letter "T" itself, as in "T's for Tradition!"  Of course, tradition, being an improper noun, does not need to be capitalized so, really, we'll be celebrating the lowercase "t".

To celebrate "t", we would construct large, wooden lowercase t's to distribute throughout the community.  The larger your wooden t, the more you love tradition!  It seems size really does matter LOL ;)

People would then put these t's in front of their houses, businesses, churches, or wherever!  We could even put them throughout the Grove, the Circle, the Quad, and especially in front of all of the fraternity houses because--as we all know--you've gotta get those Greeks on board if you want to get something done at Ole Miss!

Then, once all of the t's have been erected throughout Oxford and Lafayette county, we wait for game day.  This is where it gets exciting!  On these days, to demonstrate our fiery passion for Ole Miss and tradition, we set the t's ablaze!  That'll really show our gameday opponents and national sports media what we're all about here, by damn!

And, to remember the lives lost in the struggle to make Ole Miss what it is today (i.e., the Civil War dead, those who died during the integration riots, students who have died on campus), we could set these t's ablaze while dressed as super-spooky ghosts!  The ghost outfits wouldn't be too difficult to make.  Why, a well starched bedsheet with some eyeholes cut out should do the trick just fine!

I think it would look a little something like what these fantastic tradition-lovers are doing in this photograph taken in rural Alabama!

How could anyone object to this fantastic tradition in the making?  I mean, our intentions are driven by otherwise good ideals and motives!  If anyone, for whatever silly reason they have, sees some other way to negatively construe this as something which could give Ole Miss a negative image, then that's their pinko, liberal, commie, Godless, homosexual fault.  Right?

T'S FOR TRADITION!  THE T'S, WILL, BURN, AGAIN!

PS - Yes, I realize I am pretty blatantly ripping off South Park with this "idea."  It still proves a point, dammit.

PPS - Hey, stupid fuckheads who still chant TSWRA.  You've got a well known, full-fledged segregationist bigot on your side now.  Congrats, dipshits.