The 4th O’ July
My cultural worth was satisfied tonight. Went to a BBQ, ate some apple pie, saw the family, drank some budwiper, and saw the standard fireworks show in Central Park San Ramon. Is that bitterness you sense? No, just wondering where all the free spiritedness went. Maybe I was just hanging with some serious cynics or maybe IT really is all controlled, forced and standardized. I guess I remember the times when Church groups were housing parking lot patriotism, with booths all over the town, selling every fire-sparkly-flaming-noisy device you could stick a match to…from firecrackers to smoke bombs, to spinning wheels to rockets. Now, you have to sneak half ass fireworks across city lines to limited areas that allow fire displays and set ’em off in bursts of controlled merriment. At times checking the corners of the street for One-Timers….
When your eyes are bigger than your world, everything is grand. I love 4th of July though for it’s originally feeling. Family gatherings, mass food and music. Staying up late to set off pyrotechnics, illegal or not, it’s still a great release. But now I’m wondering where the central communal party is. Shouldn’t this day be bigger? Huge in fact! I think Cinco de Mayo in downtown San Jose get’s a bigger party. We’re all living on Mexican land anyway so why not eh? But really… where’s that companionship, comradery and champion party us Americans clam to be celebrating? I want blocked off streets, beer gardens, hat’s with crazy sparklers, bands playing Bruce Springsteen and John Cougar Meloncamp songs and naked people with red white and blue painted all over their bodies…well maybe that’s a little over the top, but you know what I mean. Besides the party, where’s the spirit? The more I write the more I know… The spirit is clouded by American capitalism. Ironic, I thought… What we had fought for in the beginning is now smothering our own economic and personal freedom. We’re probably taxed more (proportionally) now than settlers were in 1774. Add on that: our environment is going to shit, inflation is rising at an uncontrollable rate, the economy… well let me stop here this is not the time for this (It’s past my bed time that’s why!). Where’d that all come from anyway…it’s like I was force fed too much Starbucks…wait…
My point of all this is very blurred, but I guess I’m just not ignorant any more. I love Forth O’ July now for the memories of what I thought it was for when I was 10 but now over a decade later, it’s become a reminder of what our people once were passionate about and what we as a nation should continue to work for, anyone remember what those faded important documents sitting under glass in Washington D.C say?….
Note to self: *Remembers the red firework at Funny Farm – What a celebration eh?*
