I ponder things. While I don’t consider myself a great thinker or rhetorician, I do like to spend time thinking about the world around me and my own observations of it. Over the weekend, one observation that has stuck with me and given me some pause, is the size of a band I use to call my own. In 1996, we were a group of 40 musicians and 8 or 9 color guard. Not a large group, but in a school with a total population of around 400, it was respectable enough. To say that the current group is a shell of its former self would be misleading at best. With 7 instrumentalists and 2 color guard, they are a walking shadow of what was once a championship-winning organization. Surprisingly, it’s not just my old group that has been diminished, but also groups that we once competed head-to-head with every week. Groups that were once 150+ members barely muster 50.

I wonder if it’s the same in other extra-curriculars. What we use to do required hours of practice, sometimes mind-numbing repetition of the same eight measures to begin closing in on perfection. Mostly, it required dedication and a willingness to allow the requirements of the group to subsume personal preferences and agendas. Is it a sign of the times that these kind of activities no longer attract the best and the brightest to the fold? A larger question is whether this decline is representative only of one economically depressed region or if similar observations could be made across wide swaths of the country.

I don’t want to be one of those people who spends a lot of time talking about how we had to work so much harder, but I don’t shrink from asserting that we did it better.

Last night I had the opportunity to talk to an individual whose opinion and respect I value highly. Unprompted, he mentioned much the same thing I had been thinking. Shaking his head as he walked away, he mentioned only that we had been in a special time and place those years ago and we would likely never see anything quite like them again.