From the Editor’s Desk: Tribe (Premium)

Leo mentioned the term tribalism on a recent episode of Windows Weekly, and it's perhaps the perfect term to describe our very human need to belong to something bigger than ourselves individually.

Now I can't stop thinking about it. We all understand tribalism because we all feel it to some degree. But it occurs that this is another example of me vaguely understanding a concept while not being fully educated about what it really means. There's probably a term for that as well.

For example, I'm sure I've written in the past about my love of Star Wars, and my need to consume as much content as I can, be it the movies, TV shows, books, comic books, YouTube videos, whatever. But I also soundly reject what I see as an extreme, infantile need to dress up like a favorite character from this universe and walk around a convention center waving a fake lightsaber. You can be part of that world---a card-carrying member of that tribe, so to speak---without being a childish idiot, right?

But a love of Star Wars is at least organic, something that develops naturally. (Or doesn't. Your choice.) Just as is a love of personal technology, which is what led us all to this same place. But even as a child, I wondered openly about the connection we feel to more coincidental circumstances, like the place we were born, the sports teams that happened to be there, or the religions our parents didn't exactly give us a choice to follow. It all seems too random to me to matter so much.

This morning after our walk, my wife and I swung by the mailboxes in our little development which, despite its small size, are all clustered together in a single structure in a curiously non-central location. And as we walked back to our home, I commented on the number of Penn State flags that people have planted in their yards. This allegiance is curious to me because we moved here from Boston, an area that has the highest concentration of higher education institutions in the country, and yet it's far less common to see that kind of promotion there, at least percentage-wise. To the rest of the country, Penn State is a non-event, but it's clearly the center of the universe for many here.

I don't get it. Of course, I would never put bumper stickers on my car either. Or buy logoed merchandise of any kind.

When I was a child, my dad split a pair of season tickets for the Boston Celtics with a few friends, and we were lucky enough to experience some incredible games in the Larry Bird era. When we got older, my brother and I took over the tickets, and we went to so many games over a decade or more that I lost track of most of it, though our attendance at the series-winning NBA Championship game in 2008 is, of course, a memorable highlight. Anyway, my wife Stephanie once asked me why I didn't wear Celtics gear to the games, but I would never spend money on such a thing: "I give them thousands of dollars every year, they should give me a shirt," I replied. They never did.

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