Torturing Pets For The Fourth

IN THE TINY TOWN deep in the heart of the former confederacy where I live in usually quiet, peaceful retirement, The 4th of July fireworks display is entirely over the top. There is no civic, public fireworks display, one isn't needed. Private backyard shoot offs occur in what seems to be every, or every other private residential back or front yard. It is the one day per year when the conservative Christians deem it appropriate to torture their own pets, as well as every other dog and cat in town.I loved fireworks as a kid, I hate them with a bloody passion as an older adult. A single, big public display, maybe at your local minor league ballpark I can handle. Our local minor league team does it after every Friday night home game, and it must be very expensive, but impressive.I'm down with that. I got no sleep last night, as the booming went on until near midnight, then mercifully ceased as my benighted neighbors started wondering where their money went, and whether it was worth it. It wasn't, and they know it, but will likely pretend that it was. My indoor cat, who is fourteen, showed no signs of distress. Perhaps her lifetime of experiencing human folly, mine and other's, has educated her to the inevitable human craziness. For me, merely knowing that fireworks terrify animals, cause cows to stop giving milk, frighten birds into dropping out of trees, abandoning their nests and fledglings and taking flight, is more than enough reason to cease and desist with the explosions. Not so for most, it seems,in me me now now America, the land where, under the pseudo sacred banner of "freedom", we go about the business of making life miserable for anybody who dares get in our way. I wadded up pieces of toilet paper and stuffed one in each ear. No good. The war zone came through in fine fettle. My two outdoor cats vanished during the Revolutionay War neighborhood reenactment, but probably would have anyway, in deference to their instinctive noctural hunting compulsions. When they showed back up a couple of hours after midnight,I was so grateful and relieved as to be tempted to forgive my masochistic neighbors, but not quite enough to actually do it. I read the stats on the number of human fingers, thumbs, and toes severed from bodies every Independence Day. It runs into the thousands,but is evidently not too high a price to pay for a few hours of battlefield noise.We are a nation of permanently mained and wounded Independenxe Day survivors. No actual military battle in humam history ever lasted as long as a typical fireworks night in the land of excess nonsense. This annual human, pet, and animal torture and carnage festival is more than sufficient reason to bring to an end our annual celebration of exploxives and death. We are, however, as a violent culutre, quite willing to pay the high price we pay, and probably a much higher one, for our few hours of annual devastation and cacophany. When I was ten or eleven my father, as he did every year, bought my sister and me a whole bunch of fireworks, and we went to a public park to shoot them off. I mindlessly threw a firecracker into a dry grassy area, and stared a wildfire. We threw a gallon of lemonade on it, but it was not ehough. The fire laughed at us,and kept spreading. We ran to the nearest house, and the occupant kindly called the fire department, which came soon and put out the fire. My father, a lawyer, suggested that we might go to jail. We didn't, but I never felt the same way about fireworks again.