Quote:
Originally posted by wptw
Give me a break. Maybe her grandmother simply grew up in an age where they weren't so uptight about every little policy and concentrated instead on the more important aspects of GLO membership like familial love and sisterhood.
Or maybe, like MY grandmother, she was just more worried about her husband and sons coming home from war in one piece. Perhaps she was writing letters overseas instead of studying her national bylaws.
Remember too that a lot of these rules and policies weren't in place way back when. The bureaucracy has crept in slowly over the years.
As I said before, I would be hesitant to second-guess the choices of an old woman who was probably wiser than I.
wptw
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I agree. Come on, who cares if somebody's wearing her mom's sorority pin? Some of us are way too uptight about the bylaws of our organizations and fail to apply them on a case-by-case basis. There's a huge difference between giving your badge away to some random lady on the street and some mother giving the pin to her daughter because it's a meaningful piece of jewelry that she wants her to have. I honestly don't even think that Theta HQ would care about this particular instance.
If you guys see some kid fall through the ice, you pull him out and he's got hypothermia and the only thing you have to wrap around him is your sorority letter sweatshirt, are you going to say, "Oops, I can't let non-initiated members wear my letters, I guess you'll have to freeze"? Of course not.
Personally I feel that:
- event shirts are okay for anybody to wear
- letters are fine for your girlfriend/boyfriend to wear if you're serious (pinned/lavaliered or more, or the equivalent thereof if one of you is not Greek)
- articles of clothing with the words spelled out or the nickname instead of the greek symbols should be okay for anybody to wear
- articles of clothing that make it pretty clear that you're not in the group ("ABC Mom" or things like that -- my friend who's a Delta Upsilon gave me an "I [heart] DU shirt" and I don't think anybody's going to mistake me for a DU) are fine in all cases
- if there's any significant meaning behind it -- such as you like to wear your deceased grandma's ABC pin on a necklace occasionally because it reminds you of stories about her college days that she used to tell you when she was little -- as long as they don't wear it as a pin itself, I see no problem with this
I don't think we have to be so uptight about every little policy, and I bet all of our nationals would agree that there are always exceptions to the bylaws.