Title
Welcoming Gritty, the new mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers, and honoring the spirit and passion that Gritty has brought to the City of Philadelphia and to the entire country, both on and off the ice.
Body
WHEREAS, Gritty was introduced to an unprepared world as the Philadelphia Flyers' new mascot on September 24, 2018, but his true age and origins remain cloaked in obscurity. His official bio merely notes that it was recent construction at the arena that disturbed his secret hideout and forced him to show his face publicly for the first time; and
WHEREAS, Gritty has been described as a 7-foot tall orange hellion, a fuzzy eldritch horror, a ghastly empty-eyed Muppet with a Delco beard, a cross of Snuffleupagus and Oscar the Grouch, a deranged orange lunatic, an acid trip of a mascot, a shaggy orange Wookiee-esque grotesquerie, a non-binary leftist icon, an orange menace, a raging id, and an antihero. He has been characterized as huggable but also potentially insurrectionary, ridiculous, horrifying, unsettling, and absurd; and
WHEREAS, The television host John Oliver opened one of his eponymous HBO shows by stating he would have preferred to spend the entire show on Gritty and now uses him as a symbol of something "hostile, consistently unsettling, temperamentally unpleasant and that screams who the [. . .] allowed this to happen"; and
WHEREAS, When Gritty floated from the rafters of the Wells Fargo Center to the tune of Miley Cyrus' "Wrecking Ball" on October 9, 2018, he also floated into our hearts and minds, weaving his googly-eyed stare, maniacal smile, and passion for hockey and hot dogs into our deep subconscious; and
WHEREAS, Gritty's storied arrival into Philadelphia was met with all the expected magnanimity of a City with a reputation for colorful and ardent fans and a creative, if skeptical, media, but as soon as Philadelphians realized non-Philadelphians were also mocking Gritty, we rose immediately to his defense and irrevoca...
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