LET'S HAVE A PARADE

Over the last few years I have grown to truly dread those words. Not that I hate parades, I hate the illusion of a parade. I’m speaking of one’s where biggest and most entry in the parade is a gigantic purple gopher wearing a banana for a hat. That is not a good float in case for some reason you think it is.

Yet in Mediocrity it was the winning entry in this one parade we had. I have to admit that I was never that clear on why we even had the parade either. It wasn’t a holiday, nor founders day or any occasion when you generally have a parade.

It was more like during one of our council meetings a lady showed up to express concern that we didn’t have enough civic pride as a community. Her solution, which I made the mistake of asking for, was that we have a parade. Whoopie.

Once she mentioned the words “civic pride” nobody on the council was prepared to vote against the parade. So we had an “I love Mediocrity” parade.

By itself I can’t say it wasn’t commendable. There was admittedly a certain merit to the idea of celebrating our community. True, most of the time the citizens are so darn apathetic that about the only time they love to celebrate is when they either leave on vacation or have a chance to move away.

Still I didn’t figure it hurt to contemplate an event that could have served to be an uplifting time of encouragement within our community. That was the theory.

Well the thing was my original idea had been that I might set this whole thing up through a committee. When I don’t create bogus committees I do love using them as reward to those who suck up to me enough.

Unfortunately for me, this lady had a cell phone and the moment the council agree she called all her friends that they descendant upon the council chamber. Within a few minutes we had a packed audience. It was all composed of citizens anxious to do there share to make this event a glorious affair. That was what I was told. It turned out to be less than an accurate comment.

Now if I had known that most of these people were, shall we say, less than prone towards reality, I might have pushed more for a committee screening process. But they at the time did seem normal enough.

And even when I had a chance to attend one of their planning sessions, I honestly didn’t notice anything particularly strange. Oh there were a couple of times when I did get an inkling that perhaps they were a little different. However it was never enough to give me any real concern.

I wish now I had paid more attention. For it turned out their secret passion was artistic expressions of an abstract and metaphor nature. Boy was that a mistake. And no matter how the lady in charge tried to convince me that a gopher was somehow a metaphor for our city’s founding father, it still looked like a purple gopher to me. All I can say is that next year we won’t be having that parade.