Staff Writer James Perry wants to flex the sheer power they possesses from wearing cowboy boots around Columbia’s campus.

Do you ever feel like spontaneously bursting out in line dance? Did you listen to “Old Town Road” at any point in 2019? Do you say “y’all” sometimes? Do you want the simple life of a farmhand, waking before the sun to help birth a baby cow in the cold, dewy sunrise as you glance at the farmer you work for and share an exhausted but content smile because you know that you have made a difference, however small, in the world? Do you want to stomp around in some funky shoes? My answer, folks, is cowboy boots.

It’s one thing to wear cowboy boots in the wild frontier of Texas, where you’re adhering to the unspoken code of The South and could at any moment be corralled into a honky tonk or some boot-scootin’. It’s something else entirely to wear cowboy boots in the concrete jungle that is Columbia’s campus. It’s more visceral, raw, powerful, as the dichotomy of that comfortable southern feeling and the bustling city life rumbles within you.

Wearing cowboy boots in the city exudes confidence. You have to know yourself to wear cowboy boots in New York. You are forced to own it. You can’t be caught slipping if you’re going to make that much of a statement, and it makes it that much more powerful.

To those who say, “wow, that’s very fall 2018 of you,” I say, “fashion seasons are constructs of the bourgeoisie dating back to the early industrialization of the textile industry in the height of French court decadence.” I can enjoy my cowboy boots whenever I want to because they’re fun, funky, and fresh. They go with anything! A dress? Absolutely. A Canadian tuxedo? Hell yeah. That bold outfit that you only have the willpower to wear every three months? They’ll only make it bolder.

The truth, my friends, is that wearing cowboy boots to your 10:10 class on a Tuesday will propel you forward for the rest of the day. I encourage everyone to take an extremely fashionable step into the new semester in some how cowboy boots!

boot-scootin’ via the boot enthusiast themself