It’s difficult for me to explain. Since I was very little, witnessing things like the high school marching band with all those kids working together to make that music and moving together down the street makes me swell up and cry. It’s not sadness, but a kind of joy and pride for the human animal that we can do that. Heck… I don’t have to witness it. It could be something more primal than joy, though. We use the parade for a celebration, but in history, the drums and pipes were used to rouse the troops and lead them into death. Maybe I feel echoes of history in the spirits surrounding a parade. Just thinking about it can make me cry. Bagpipe music makes me cry too, without a parade or a funeral. I wasn’t sensitive to the pipes as a child. That was grown into. It’s the same kind of feeling as when I cry at a wedding. Why should I cry then? It’s not me giving my life away, yet there I am with eyes brimming.
It’s not about whether the parade is “good” or “bad”, but more just the fact that it’s happening and people are putting that concerted effort into it. The fact that anyone put any effort into it shows something. Why do people make parades? Why do people want to be in them? Why do others want to watch them. You will be the judge of whether it’s a good or bad parade and I will just be proud (for some reason) that it happened. I’ll be smiling and crying if I just hear the drums coming in the distance, and know there’s a parade over that way….