ari_ormstunga

Last night, I used a bit of my stimulus monies from our beneficent leaders to purchase some explosives to celebrate the founding of our nation (a day early as it happens, but I have to return to my noble paid labors tomorrow and will need to be abed early tonight). Said explosives, I should hasten to add, were simply fireworks from the huge fireworks store just down the road from me. I don't know if these exist everywhere or if the tiny hamlet in which I reside is just super lucky, but we have a large outlet packed with nothing but fireworks. These are not the sort of fireworks we used to buy at the department store when I was a lad. No, they have smoke bombs and bottle rockets and sparklers, of course, but most of these are powerful devices created in faraway lands, ready to light up the night sky, or blow the hands off of the drunk or unwary (which is a fine Fourth of July tradition here in the corner of Michigan where I reside).

I had a jolly time taking my youngest boy to the fireworks store. It was packed, I am pleased to say, with people of all races, all of us together to get stuff to make groovy explosions, which is pretty fricken American I think. It was also packed with high shelves of fireworks. My son kept asking me what each brightly colored box we passed was, to which I replied each time "those are fireworks, son; everything in this store is fireworks". We picked up whatever looked intriguing, as I frantically tried to calculate in my head and keep track of how much government money I was sinking into this endeavor. My purchase was modest compared to the man in the Eagle/American Flag/Declaration of Independence print shirt in line in front of me, who spent over five hundred bucks and didn't bat an eye about it. Still, I bought too much to be safe.

Come (near) dark, my boys and I set things up in the back yard, burying a pipe at a 45 degree angle in the earth for the "Big 'Uns" as we dubbed them, and set up a plank for the smaller sparkler jets. My girlfriend came out for awhile, but as she hates noise and gets nervous when things are catching fire and blowing up, she just watched indulgently for awhile before tapping out and going back inside. She may or may not be a Communist; she lacks our All-American true grit and will for mayhem.

We set off quite a few very loud and borderline terrifying explosions, let me tell you. I taught the boys about how we blow stuff up on the Fourth to celebrate our independence from evil old King George, and to scare away him and his Redcoat ghost army until next year when the ritual must be repeated. My older boy seemed skeptical about this but we had a great time yelling "Screw King George!" and bellowing "America!" at the tops of our lungs. To be fair, it was mostly me doing the bellowing.

We managed to not set anything on fire and we have a few "Big Uns" left for home defense; you never know when you may need to scare away Antifa agents, right-wing insurgents, or our meth-head neighbors.

All joking aside, when we came indoors after the spectacle was over, I felt a twinge of sadness. I don't know what kind of world my boys are inheriting, but it is doubtful that they will know even the extremely relative level of ease and comfort that I've known, where being bored at my 9-5 was the most challenging task I faced most days. Maybe that's a good thing in some ways, but as I look around at the country and world around me, I'm afraid that they will have a different struggle indeed ahead of them.