Wednesday, July 11, 2007

CM PRESS # 174


FIERY ODE TO JOY ON THE FOURTH OF JULY RIGHT AT OUR CURBS UPSETS LOCAL GRUMPS

It was a fun night out on the back streets and cul-de-sacs of Costa Mesa this past 4th of July for kids and their parents. Youth was in the air. The city was alive.

The curbs were lined with those who had bought twenty-buck fireworks displays full of colorful and interesting little cardboard boxes, pyramids and cylinders with names like "Sparkling Fountain," and "Good Luck Pagoda."

They were fun to hold and guess from the weight about the quality of the contents and to look at and wonder what they would actually do when their fuses were lit.

The fireworks were cheap, but there was an immediacy, and a spontaneous exuberance involved both in the anticipation of lighting them off, and in actually doing so, that is usually missing in the much larger professional displays where one is just a passive observer. Doing the fireworks yourself brings all your senses into play.

Don't get us wrong, the big displays are also nice. Still...

The small neighborhood displays put you in the action the way the big displays can't. The sudden sounds, sights and smells when they're lit off speak to the reason we even have such displays on the 4th of July at all--we are at the birthday party for a still somewhat young, full of life, hands-on nation that burst on the scene and which brashly and without apology put itself in the very center of the stage on this planet with the vigor and lack of soul damping introspection that is natural to youth. We are a people with a tradition not of passively watching from the sidelines as spectators, but of being active participants--in our lives, in our government, and in our fireworks.

These semi-spontaneous neighborhood events right in front of our homes are subconscious metaphors for joyous, expanding life and they're exciting for our kids to whom the sounds, sights and smells of fireworks are new and wonderful. These kids are in the springtime and summers of their existence and they are not yet jaded by the ways of the world.

Fireworks are buds opening for the first time on a spring morning to display their here-I-am-world-I'm-alive joy and they are light pushing back the darkness without apology.

Beethoven's Ode to Joy and Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture were given their soul stirring expression on every block full of kids without ever being played. To adults, the fireworks may have seemed small things, but adults live a different season than kids.

From the above, you've probably already guessed that we agree with Steve Smith's conclusion in the Daily Pilot that such neighborhood fireworks displays should continue. However, we don't agree with Smith's reasoning to get to that conclusion. Smith posits an ends justifies the means argument and inadvertently sets up a straw man to be easily knocked down.

Smith's argument is that we need the fireworks to raise money for local youth sports teams. Actually, there are many other ways that such money can be raised, and a moment's reflection on this by most people would suggest such ways.

No, the real reason the curbside fireworks should be continued is because they're part of our tradition, they're fun for our kids and they're a close to home reminder of what the Fourth of July is all about--freedom, independence, and the wild exuberance of youth that so characterized our nation for many years. Rationalize and justify the continued use by saying it's to raise money if necessary, but know in your heart that it's really about the joy of being alive.

It has not gone unnoticed to some readers who have contacted us that some (but not all) of the most vocal opponents of fireworks in our city seem to be older childless grouches with sour dispositions. The winter that is within the souls of some of these gloomy people, and the sterility of their beings is shown in their "get off the lawn" attitude toward youth and the things of youth.

Some of these perennially unhappy folks look as though they have no blood in their veins and as though their shoes are too tight and their underwear itches.

Let's keep Costa Mesa a fun and exuberant city and let's reject the desire to make it an antiseptic and sterile place because a few loud mouth sad sacks are full of winter.

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Those are our opinions. Thanks for reading them.

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