Celebrate Your Country's Independence By Blowing A Part Of It Up
Thank you, Apu. Hope everyone had a happy and safe holiday. I am pleased to announce that over the weekend, I felt the stirrings of a long-dormant love affair...with fireworks. I'm not talking about professional pyrotechnics-I can always muster enthusiasm for about 20 minutes of "ooh" and "aah".
I'm talking about Do It Yourself fireworking. You know, actually going into that roadside tent and browsing the shelves. One of the great joys of my childhood was going to the fireworks tents. You had to go outside the city limits to do it, although you typically only had to go about three feet outside the city limits. But once in that tent, you were like a kid in a candy store. We always walked out with the same stuff, though: bottle rockets, smoke bombs, some parachutes, and few rockets of various sizes and potentials.
Somewhere along the way, I lost that love. I just didn't care to actually set off fireworks anymore. I figured it was gone for good, a remnant of my childhood. Then, on this last Thursday, July 4th, I was overcome with a peculiar notion as I left the liquor store in Kimball, MN: I wanted to go inside a fireworks tent. Why was I overcome with this sudden urge from my past? Probably because there was a fireworks tent three feet from my parked car, and they were having a bit of an inventory problem. In other words, they had overbought, and they were now practically giving everything away to avoid having a garage full of fireworks for a full year.
I walked in, and was immediately given a tour by the young woman who was probably responsible for carting away and storing everything that didn't sell. I haven't seen a sales job this good since I bought all that Amway. (Does Amway even exist anymore? Is that joke even relevant these days? Note to self: update material on "sales"...) Anyway, this girl was giving me the grand tour, telling me what each thing did, telling me their discount policy. But the best part was, she was trying to sell me on these fireworks. "Oh, this one, you will love the plumage of smoke and flare that this gives out. It will really reflect nicely off the lake water...", like she's personally tested all of these fireworks in various conditions.
I noticed right away that there were no bottle rockets or parachutes. Something about them being "illegal" and "dangerous"...Which, in the world of fireworks, usually equates to "fun". Why they can't sell those things, but can sell a boxed smorgasbord of goodies called "Junior Pyro" is beyond me. I walked out with two coffee-can shaped things, a couple rockets, and some other crap that the girl begged me to take for free.
So, long story short, we wait till 10:30, because it gets dark so damned late up here, then we go down by the lake to set them off. The mosquitoes are so thick you practically need a blood transfusion to get back up to the cabin, and in the meantime, you realize that you just spent $17 on a bunch of lame crap that lasts two minutes and isn't even powerful enough to scare my dog.
The joy of fireworks isn't in the watching. It's in the interaction of the thing. It's in trying to make a bottle rocket go a certain place and do a certain thing. It's a sport, really. I think I reached a certain point where I realized that the danger involved wasn't worth the fun, though there are even odds that I would have refound that love if there had been some bottle rockets around for me to buy.
It's probably for the best, I suppose. I like having all my digits and both my eyes.
In other news, Buddy Ebsen died. Man, it has been open season on celebrities lately, hasn't it? Read about Buddy Ebsen's life. He did a lot of cool stuff. I always liked Buddy Ebsen.
This article appeared in yesterday's Star Tribune. It is a discussion of the increasingly public role that faith is playing in political careers. Here are some of the more notable quotes:
State Rep. Michael Beard, a freshman Republican representative from Shakopee and publisher of the Minnesota Christian Chronicle, said he's happy that evangelical Christians like himself are getting more involved in politics and are having a wider influence.
"There is no one church in charge," he said. "These are just ordinary people whose allegiance is to Jesus.
"Will the church take over the state? No. But will Christian principles take over? Oh, yes. And no one has anything to fear from that."
Really? I'm not so sure I buy that no one has anything to fear from that. I can think of a lot of groups that are on the wrong side of "evangelical Christian" belief. More troubling is this quote from Minnesota Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer:
Kiffmeyer asserts that when church-state separatists keep all references to religion out of the public sphere "that establishes a religion -- atheism. When we don't allow anyone to post the scriptures on the wall or crosses then we're really promoting atheism, a belief."
Excuse me? Not wanting to have the scriptures or crosses up means you are an atheist? I wonder how Muslims or non-Christians might feel about that? I can tell you how I feel about it as an Agnostic. I find it incredibly offensive. For one thing, I don't like being lumped in with atheists, who tend to be as dogmatic and arrogant about their "non-faith" as many of the fundamentalists they decry.
But it's also just an ignorant and arrogant statement. This mindset is far too common for my tastes, and it is becoming more prevalent all the time. I'm not convinced that the majority of our country has this kind of relationship and view of God, but it is clear to me that many of the people who are involved in politics at the local and even national level are increasingly of this view.
Of course, it's all about God when it comes to discussions of sodomy, homosexuality, abortion or election season. But where is the dedication to Jesus' beliefs in helping those who cannot help themselves when it comes to budget cuts and tax relief?
Do I think we are moving to a theocracy? A de facto theocracy, perhaps. But I wonder if this really has staying power. These groups' influences wax and wane, and it figures that their influence would ebb after 911 and during a GOP resurgence. But I honestly believe that the majority of Americans do not share this type of dogmatic belief in faith, just as I believe that our country as a whole is not as Conservative as the polls and election results would have us believe. Somewhere along the line, this imbalance will right itself.
10:43:54 AM 
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