Fireworks

It’s July 4^th and I’m sitting in our family room watching fireworks from various time zones with Mary and Daughter Two. And the dogs.

Odin and Zoey are petrified by the booms and whistles. Or more accurately, Zoey is terrified. I think Odin views them as more of an affront than an assault. At any rate, they don’t like it when the neighbors start setting off their pyrotechnic toys, especially the ones that make big booms.

Truth be told, I really don’t like them, either.  They’re illegal for good reasons associated with fires and injuries and breaching the peace. But I’ve learned that trying to put a stop to it is like playing an infinite game of Whack-A-Mole, and just pisses off the people who’re setting them off, most of whom are half in the bag.

So here we sit trying to reassure the dogs that their world is not coming to an end and watching the big, high angle shows on the tube. And I got to thinking.

This holiday ostensibly celebrates the birth of this nation. A worthy event to celebrate, I’m sure we can agree. As I’ve written before, I feel pretty lucky concerning the where / when into which I was born.

By this time next year, we’ll be embroiled in a national election cycle, either confirming the current administration or choosing a replacement. You may believe you can deduce from my posts here which side of the line I’ll come down on but don’t bet money just yet. In at least two of the last six national elections, I switched horses within the last two or three months before the big day.

The thing is, national elections bring out their own brand of fireworks. This one has the potential to turn ugly. The issues that have been simmering now threaten to boil over. Issues that get to the core for many people, such as the relationship or not between church and state, who gets to count as a whole citizen, whether immigrants are as welcome as they once were, what is the role of government, and whether we look to the precise wording of the constitution or try to divine intent and apply it to current realities. We live under the protective reach of this great formative document that was designed to be instructive of our responsibilities to each other, protective of our individual and collective rights, and sufficiently elastic to accommodate societal evolution.

Our arguments should revolve around how we live together under this umbrella but lately has become an exercise in trying to say who gets to hold the umbrella. The rhetoric I’ve been hearing too often marginalizes opponents, not for being misguided, but as being undeserving. We too often leave the other guy without a place to stand.

The problem with the noisy and dangerous fireworks is simple to resolve. We stay in our house, have the hose and extinguishers handy, and load up Odin and Zoey on doggy downers. We can turtle our way through this, because we have to be able to live with our neighbors in the morning. It may hurt our pride, but we really lose nothing by just hunkering down and waiting it out.

We won’t have that option with a national election. If we turn our cheeks, we may well end up with horrid leadership and the erosion of our Bill of Rights. We’ve no choice but to engage.

I just hope we can do so in such a way that we can still feel like neighbors in the morning.