Take a moment and think back to January with me. Not about your hectic finals, your newly made New Year’s resolutions, and your longing for your Winter Break back. No, think back to the Martin Luther King Day assembly we had on a mid-January Friday.

At this assembly, you’ll surely remember, Jamie Utt spoke to us about being people willing to stand up against bullying, abuse and what we know to be wrong in our school community. He told us that once an idea or trend, such as anti-bullying, reaches a certain critical mass, the number of people supporting it  can spike overnight, turning what may have been previously seen as unpopular into the mainstream thinking of the student body. He told us that we have the potential to be what he called tipping points, and enact major change in our school for the better.

I think we can apply this idea of the tipping point and critical mass to our school spirit as well. Looking around me this Be About Week, I see a sad amount of participation; barely anyone outside of ASB is dressing up. People attribute their lack of spiritedness to everything from tiredness to laziness to what they deem are hard themes to dress up for.

However, I also think many of us base our decisions on whether to dress up or not on whether other people do. It’s psychological – about fitting in and trying not to look stupid. We don’t want to be the one enthusiastically-spirited person in a sea of un-spirited others. But maybe if just a few more of us resolved to really be a part of the spirit here at Liberty, spiritedness could reach critical mass, and our school pride and zeal could swell overnight.

Admittedly, I haven’t done a great job of showing school spirit and dressing up for spirit days this year. But after seeing how un-spirited and unmotivated our student body was for Be About Week, I resolve to change that. So much of the fun of high school is supposed to be in having pride and spirit within the student body, and we’re missing out when we don’t participate in the days ASB designs to build that sense of community. So, I resolve to be part of that number necessary to reach a critical mass for spirit, and I hope you will too.