The Fourth

I’ve never cared for the whole blowing shit up aspect of the Fourth of July. The smell of sulfer, potassium nitrate, and charcoal wafting in the air like poison fog as drunk weekend warriors dig into their grab bag of legal explosives and giggle like overgrown baby ogres.

Your burgers are burning, moron.

Listen, I hate to spoil your fun but exploding civilian dynamite till 1 am isn’t really celebrating America. You think veterans dealing with PTSD like that? Do you think reminding them of that time they were in a fire fight in Fallujah or Cambodia is going to get them all tingly and patriotic? And you know your four-legged friend that’s quivering in the corner panting and looking like he might stroke out? You think he’s liking this booming light show till the wee hours of the morning? No he’s not. And neither am I.

I’m good with red, white, and blue parades down Main Street. Marching bands, firemen throwing candy for the little tikes to come dangerously close to getting run over in order to snag from the gutter, and guys in camoflauge Gators waving stiffly at gawking crowds. I’m always up for grilling some burgers, making up some potato salad, and yucking with friends over an oat soda or two as Lee Greenwood plays in the distance. Hell, maybe even watch Yankee Doodle Dandy or Born On The Fourth Of July. But this obsession with fireworks and the louder the better with explosives till 2am is tired and pointless.

Do they even know what this holiday is? Celebrating America’s independence from England? I’d think you’d want it to be a quiet, solemn kind of holiday. Reflective, and being thankful we don’t have to boil all of our food or pretend the Royal family means anything other than fun reality TV. I don’t know, maybe I just don’t “get it”, man.

Fireworks are quite the cottage industry around here. Year round fireworks stores, pop-up tents in the parking lots of Kohls and Walmart, storefronts appearing in shuttered Family Videos and Blimpie’s, and even the roadside Fireworks sales – carnie style – are all over here. There’s money in selling people explosives they have no business purchasing, but as long that guy can pull cash out of his wallet with what remaining digits he’s got on his hand the fireworks dealer will happily sell them to him.

I get it. We’re proud to be Americans. We live in a country where we can be what we want, do what we want, and say what we want. We have opportunities not afforded to many other countries. But what I see is people crapping on these inalienable Rights, poo-pooing on their opportunities afforded to them here in the U.S., and instead of enriching their lives by bettering themselves they’d rather just blow shit up on the Fourth, and proclaim themselves Patriots. Then the other 364 days of the year they let whichever political ideology they blindly follow guide them to their inevitable moronic end. And what politics doesn’t ruin in them, their church certainly will.

So hey, happy Fourth.