The Difference Between Fireworks and Firearms
Today we Americans celebrate the notion of Independence from tyranny. Marked on our calendars is the Fourth, the big one, a day that almost doesn’t need us to add, “July” to its naming. With all its many problems and with all our country’s many exclusions and oppressions, for most of us the Fourth often holds a consolation, one that briefly suspends pain and fears with the promise of a collective celebration.
On the Fourth, fireworks displays make people beautiful against a backdrop of magical colors and shapes that glitter like fast-moving constellations. They leave us bathed in reflections the color of rainbows, in some kind of temporary dream. Firearms displays with all their military expressions create dreamscapes as well. Firearms however, generate dreary backgrounds that recall the gulags, the trenches, the footage of scorched earth and equally scorched bodies that are the hallmark of modern warfare.
With fireworks there is a call to celebrate life — all life — to focus on the positive use of fire power technology to recall some universal mystery that sparked these lives we live. With firearms there is less of a positive promise and more of a threat, implicit as it might be, that the beast side of fire technology can not be contained. The threat of firearms displays might seem to be directed at enemies but it stirs in each of us an uncertainty, a sense of our smallness, and the willingness of some to sometimes play God.
Subliminally as well explicitly the difference between fireworks and firearms displays is less than small. Fireworks imply the transcendent nature of the human spirit, while firearms call forth the will of leaders to sacrifice the bodies of their people. Tank crews in particular, have often met grisly fates.
Today’s conversation is not about the right to bear arms, or the need to have a military force. Today’s controversy is about the focus of our attention and true belief in the nature of independence. Either we believe that independence is a grace imbued to us by nature and celebrated as such, or we view it as something that can only be obtained by force and control.
No doubt the way of the warrior can be sacred, and it is the requirement of all to uphold that relationship and to explore it. The warrior is as old an archetype as any we have, yet the warrior does not start by celebrating bloodlust or machines that kill more efficiently.
The warrior seeks the avoidance of all-out battle, as did General Black Jack Pershing, as did Sun Tzu. Actual use of force comes after social relationships, negotiations, after reconnaissance and reason have failed. Physical might is generally exercised after mental battles have been lost. Physical displays of might usually come after legitimate leadership has been corrupted.
This Fourth we are being asked to question the path of our dreams, and to live accordingly with respect for the dreams of others we call brethren; our fellow citizens. We are being called to celebrate our independence — — even our interdependence — and to revel in our growing capacity to engage each other with wonder and respect instead of the shock and demands based in the threat of death.
This Fourth I have a wish: that we may dream actively together, across apparent divides, to explore the power found in independence woven with unity. I wish that we may earnestly audit which displays of firepower will actually propel us deeper into our individual sense of liberty as endowed not by strong men, but by the mystery of our very creation. From this sense of wonder may we continue to dream an America that is resilient with justice, and sparkling with a collective happiness not just on the Fourth, but day after day.
