Is July 5th too soon after the Independence Day celebrations to confess that I don’t love fireworks? Like everyone else, I enjoy trying to capture fireworks in photographs. At the same time, every boom, crackle and hiss makes me cringe. Explosions are the soundtrack for the lives of men, women and children all over the world. They can’t call the police at 2 in the morning to complain about the neighbors putting fire crackers inside mailboxes. They lie awake at night evaluating their proximity to the violence the way my children count the time between thunder and lightning. They go about their days in a sleep deprived stupor surrounded by the never ending noise of gunfire and IEDs. I do not find the noises of war celebratory. I prefer the sounds of music and laughter, the taste of watermelon and the blue summer sky. I celebrate the sweet smell of sticky, sweaty children. Give me a picnic in the mountains over exploding anvils any day.
You know, if you had just said you don’t like the noise, I wouldn’t be writing this right now. But you had to try to find a deeper message, about how awful war is, and implying that there is nothing worth celebrating in it.
When the slaves heard the sounds of Sherman’s infantry as they marched and burned their way to the sea, do you think they were terrified, or do you think they celebrated their approaching freedom? When the prisoners of Auschwitz heard the sounds of Allied artillery approaching, did they lose sleep from fear, or from anticipation of their rescue?
The picture you paint of war is one sided.
I was thinking yesterday that you have to have a penis to really get into fireworks. I don’t think I have spoken to any female that really loves them. And I’m not sure kids are really that into them either. I was looking at them wondering if children in china packaged them and what their carbon footprint is.
I don’t really think there is much about war to be celebrated unless it is the return of peace after it is over or the undoing of various wrongs that caused one to enter into war in the first place. But the sounds of explosions (the sound of people possibly getting blown to bits)…yeah sorry I guess I am too much of a hippie humanist to enjoy it.
I want to RT this but I don’t think I could effectively convey it in 140.
Instead I simply and unimaginatively say this: Ditto! What you said!
That spam filter needs a bit of tweaking there. It allows “penis” but stops “Freedom” “Liberty” … or what?
LissaKay- Did you get a captcha?
Nope, no captcha at all. I did put a link in the comment – is it set to reject links perhaps? I think I shortened it with TinyURL. Spam tools are great, until they don’t work like we want them too!
Morgan, I’m not surprised you don’t like fireworks. After all, the Chinese did invent them to keep the evil spirits away…*grin*
Lissa- It’s just SpamKarma with basically the default settings. SpamKarma has never done any tinyurl conversion. That would leave it at a) possibly a browser plugin on your end or b) a feature of her new theme that is just being discovered (probably b).
I did get a plain white page with text after posting the comment, which said my comment had been flagged as spam and was being held for moderation. I guess it just doesn’t like my sense of humor 😀
Rich – har.
Actually I must add that I spent my 4th of July with two Iraq War vets (my boyfriend and his friend) and of course they loved blowing stuff up. Then again, their idea of a good movie has guns, explosions and boobs, lol. They’ve even lost friends to war, but, they aren’t mothers and they don’t always think stuff through very much, lol.
I dislike the ones that make noise. It makes me nervous! But I love smoke bombs and sparklers… I could do those every day and be happy. 🙂