With the Independence Day just around the corner, it’s time to turn to our spacious skies, slack-jawed and drooly, to celebrate America! Yay! I remember hopping from foot to foot at 8:50 every Fourth of July as a kid, waiting for the magical hour of 9:00 PM to approach. That was when sufficient darkness would envelop the land, and WHAMMO! It was showtime! Gold puffballs haloed by green, pink, silver strands of fire, all crumbling to the ground in crackly splendor. Ooooh, and the finale–almost every firework my small town could afford, detonated all at once. Yaaaaay!!!
But first, there was always that damnable, mosquito-plagued waiting. And that hopping from foot to foot: it was the gotta-pee dance, since we’d been in the mall parking lot for so lo— –Alas, I’ve disclosed too much of my white-trashtastic roots. Yep, we pulled up lawn chairs at the local mall parking lot, “‘Cause why wouldja fight them pesky crowds at the park, when ya could see ‘em jest as well from the mall?” Ahhh, sweet youth! And if you’re anything like me, sweet youth also involved spying a Roman candle that belched out colorful balls of fire from a backyard near the public fireworks venue–and liking it better than the measly extravaganza your township put on that year.
Maybe most public displays are overrated. Besides, some of us are now thinking about the pollutants that these Conflagrations for Freedom release into the air. Sheesh! And I thought staying away from those roadside tents where sparklers are proffered by three-fingered merchants was the responsible thing to do! But now, we’re damned if we do patronize public fireworks displays and damned if we take matters into our own irresponsible, misguided, nanny-state-needing, potentially blown-off hands and set off those pretty Roman candles.
What to do? Well, maybe we should decouple fireworks from the Fourth and just blow up stuff for freedom whenever the urge strikes. The kids in my neighborhood blew stuff up on a year-round basis. In fact, I lost one mighty fine Muppets lunchbox to an M-80 and a majestic display of bad-assity. (I was fifteen; still tears me up to this day.). The point is, none of us has discovered the cure for cancer or become a captain of civics or industry. We’re probably of average or sub-average intelligence, all. And yet, we managed to retain our full complement of fingers, and not a singed eyebrow among the lot of us. It probably would have been even better and safer, however, had fireworks not been the slightly dangerous, illicit forbidden fruit that many state laws have made them. That way, we could have practiced our blowing-up of stuff without being sneaky–and under parental supervision. Who knows? Maybe we would’ve limited it to the Fourth.
Use common sense, be safe, but by all means, keep on exercising the freedom to blow stuff up in the name of America this Fourth of July–whether you outsource it (like it or not, there’ll probably always be a demand for those big old pollution-spewing monster displays) or take matters into your own powder-burned hands!
