I am not going to delve into the irony of celebrating the independence of the United States from England while the country is busily installing our first king ourselves. Anyone likely to be reading this shares the same existential dread I do but that is a different conversation. What I want to talk about today is explosions.
I don’t know if the brain-stem level enthusiasm for blowing things up is uniquely American or something that is just a product of the recklessness of youth but either way, people just don’t let up. Fireworks are, as far as I know, illegal county-wide now but that doesn’t really seem to have discouraged anyone.
The hypocrisy coming off this post is obscuring my screen, so allow me to justify my change of stance. Not just change, I suppose, but polar reversal. I was as mindlessly enthusiastic about blowing stuff up in my youth as anyone and, like most American males, the recklessness of youth lasted well into my 30s. Since then, however, I have had a number of experiences which have led me to change my position. The key experiences, unsurprisingly, were working in an ER, developing a hyperactive startle response1, and owning a dog. As I have aged the risk to my own personal fingers, toes, ears, and nose has diminished considerably of course but one still has a certain sympathy for the people who will spend the rest of their lives, starting tomorrow, unable to count to twenty unassisted. The startle and the dogs continue to be an issue in the household. Having a ninety pound dog trying to hide underneath you because some yabbo in the street set off a firecracker is a unique experience.
I suspect nothing is going to change how my fellow Americans choose to celebrate their rapidly vanishing freedoms so if anyone needs me I will be hiding under the bed with the dogs.
- It is possible that these two things are related. ↩︎
Our area was surprisingly calm this year, which is especially ironic given the fact that fireworks are actually legal here. I don’t know to what to attribute this. Demographic considerations such as average age of homeowners, presence of children, “social status” (whatever that means) would all seem to be possible culprits, but I can’t really nail down any definable differences between your neighborhood and ours, except a slight economic one, but even that gap is narrowing over time IMO. Do you think fireworks use in your area has gotten better over time, worse or no discernable change? I ask because I think our area might be “aging out” of it.