Thoughts on the Fourth of July

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It’s 11:17 p.m., July, 4 2015. The illegal fireworks are still going off. It’s been a constant cacophony since 5 p.m. as God intended it to be.

Yeah, God. You know, The Creator (or Creatress if you prefer) who endowed everyone with certain unalienable rights — including the Pursuit of Happiness.

All those millions of folks shooting off firecrackers, Roman candles, mortars and rockets, which are mostly illegal in most states — they’re pursuing happiness.

But does the Creator approve of such a bold and brassy display of brazen law-breaking?

Ben Franklin sure thought so. He said, “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”

He wanted to place that slogan on the flip side of The Great Seal of the United States — along with an engraving of the Children of Israel exiting Egypt through the parted waters of the Red Sea.

Wars (and revolutions) have fought great causes, but it’s the little atrocities that make people fighting mad.

I’ve always felt that attempts by America’s nanny-statists to ban fireworks — in the name of safety and protecting the children, of course, the real last refuges of scoundrels — qualified as a little atrocity. Banning fireworks is an attempt to interfere with the pursuit of happiness — and on a day when we set off fireworks to celebrate the pursuit of happiness, at that.

Banning fireworks on the Fourth of July takes real chutzpah, and you have to wonder how the petty tyrants who did it have been able to get away with it for so long.

Especially since the same paragraph of the Declaration of Independence that declares the “Pursuit of Happiness” to be an “unalienable Right”, co-equal with Life and Liberty and a gift from God, also says that when a government quits protecting unalienable God-given rights, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.

Ah, but in the very next sentence the Declaration provides an explanation of why America’s petty tyrants keep getting a pass:

“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms [of government] to which they are accustomed.”

In other words, Americans put up with a lot of petty tyranny, because they consider it “light and transient.” But what makes the acts of petty tyrants “sufferable”? Well, one metric is the extent to which their little atrocities can be ignored and defied.

Which brings us back to our national tradition of setting off thousands of tons of illegal fireworks every Fourth of July.

The fact that most of the fireworks that ordinary Americans set off on the Fourth are illegally obtained, illegally possessed and illegally ignited transforms the innocent and joyful act of using them into a small act of rebellion to petty tyrants. And makes lighting them off all the sweeter.

What could be more American than sticking a finger in the eye of petty tyrants? What better way to keep the Spirit of ’76 alive than with small acts of defiance against petty tyranny? And to do it in a way that involves gunpowder at that.

Hey, it’s a revolution we’re celebrating. And a revolution is not a dinner party. Or even a picnic.

(Actually, on this side of the pond it can be a Tea Party, but I digress.)

But what about safety? What about all the people who burn, maim or kill themselves by mishandling fireworks, like the poor bastard who tried to set off a mortar on his head this year? What about the grass fires? What about the frightened puppies (including the furry ones)?

No doubt about it; if you’re going to set off fireworks, there is a small but real chance that you can do yourself and your neighborhood some lasting harm.

But is the pursuit of happiness of tens of millions of Americans to be stunted and crippled because of a few thousand bad choices, accidents and burned fingers? If that had been the prevailing attitude in 1776, today you would be singing “Rule Britannia” instead of “proud to be an American.”

Maybe the fact that fireworks are not completely safe is a feature, not a bug. That is because liberty is not completely safe. Obtaining and exercising your free dom is a sometimes dangerous business and an on-going exercise in risk-taking, and we should never forget it.

And a good way to remember that is by having a small measure of danger in our national celebration of freedom’s victory.

In fact, judging by the Bill of Rights, which transformed the principles in the Declaration into specific, legally binding guarantees, liberty is in no small part defined by the extent to which people have access to dangerous things — like, for example, guns, printing presses, protest meetings and Bibles (or Korans if you prefer).

As for protecting the children, America’s young are increasingly being taught to be timid, so it’s good that at least on one night a year they get a taste of defiance — served with a small side of danger.

This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.