I got through Independence Day, but only barely. I tossed and turned, listening to explosions and gunfire until the dawn's early light, when I finally sank into fitful dreams of running through post-nuclear ashes from robotic hunter-killers.
Maybe I'm getting cranky and old as I close in on 30. Perhaps I'm a limpwristed peacenik. But just between you and me, I kind of hate the Fourth of July.
Let me explain: I recently moved to El Sobrante, an unincorporated territory nestled in the rolling hills of West Contra Costa County. I'm 20 yards from the industrial dystopia of Richmond, Ca. where friendly neighbors like Chevron, General Chemical, and Tosco poot endless streams of sulfur dioxide and trioxide into the air, and where, mysteriously enough, nearly every child has asthma and/or emphysema. This crumbling urban oasis, only 10 miles from Berkeley, consistently ranks with the big boys like D.C. and Oakland for its annual per-capita murder rate, despite a population of about 100,000.
My friends and I used to put on free concerts in a decrepit waterfront park in Richmond, where at low tide we frequently found automatic weapons in the mud.
All of this is to say, gunfire is something you begin to expect on those special days, the American holidays that more and more resemble pagan tributes to war deities. July 4, New Year's Day, the Super Bowl, Memorial Day, etc. Once the sun sets, the gunfire begins, and it sounds like a political rally in Tehran.
Firing off a couple hundred rounds every once in a while doesn't bother me, really. It's the idea that, in order to affirm our identity as Americans we're expected to simulate battlefield conditions while choking down cylinders of unmentionable ground up pork leavings.
Don't get me wrong; I honor the very real sacrifices made by the brave American colonists, a ragged bunch of farmers living on squirrel meat and whiskey and fighting against the world's most powerful army. And against all odds, actually winning.
And the Founding Fathers, as aristocratic as they may have been, laid everything on the line. They knew what the stakes were, and I believe their commitment to the American experiment was sincere, despite how they rather blithely glossed over some of the contradictions. You don't make the kind of leap they made for a simple tax break.
Since then, the story of America has been the struggle to make the U.S. live up to the ideals they set down in the Declaration of Independence, which is arguably the crowning achievement of the Enlightenment. And the American Revolution is far from over.
But all that is very far from needing the 8-year-olds next door to set off ordinance next to my car at 2 a.m. But if I object, I'm not only a hard-ass but I'm unpatriotic as well.
The fact is, I rather like NOT living in a war zone, even a simulated one. Part of my trepidation may be that I live in an unincorporated, semi-rural area covered with dry grass. Part of it is that, well, I happen to think peace is one of the sweetest fruits of liberty, which is directly proportional to our access to information and power. I appreciate that armed gangs do not roam the streets freely, keeping citizens in a constant state of fear. Oh, except for cops. Watch out for those guys.
It's not even the implied killing that I object to. I mean, if Independence Day was all about mock sword battles, I'd be out there with a foam-padded claymore fwapping my fellow Americans like I was Mel Gibson. I guess I kind of have a problem with guns and bombs, and the kind of blithe attitude it engenders towards killing and warfare. Certainly there are times when you must defend your (abstract political body or ideal here), but I think if you've really got to kill another man, you better be sure enough about it to look him in the eye.
Anyway, I think one of our missions should be to reduce the amount of explosions going on in the world, in every corner of the American Empire. I'll gladly give up hot dogs and potato chips if I never have to hear another explosion again, or even if the colonials in Ramadi and Basra can sit down for a picnic without fear of getting blown to smithereens.