Founding Father President John Adams instinctively knew that Independence Day would always remain America’s most important holiday: “I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty,” he wrote to his wife, “it ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”
President Trump is in full agreement. The US is at a crossroads between socialism and freedom, as Victor Davis Hanson warns in his recent essay on our polarized nation,
“American citizenship is eroding”: “To avoid a fragmentation of society based on racial and ethnic chauvinism takes an extra effort to keep the melting pot working. We’re no longer making that effort. Indeed, we’re doing the opposite, encouraging diversity rather than unity.”
What better place to celebrate than Mount Rushmore, knowing that this part of South Dakota sits right at the geographical center of the 48 states? From the Canadian to the Mexican borders, this territorial zone also symbolizes the end of the frontier. Ask the Sioux and Apaches. Settlers moved west from the “Old World” east coast, but also east from the dead-ended west coast.
Not peaked out with high-density populations and traffic, South Dakota still has the ambience of small towns and peaceful rural ampleness–just like life used to be during America’s founding period. Hanson would agree. There is racial concord in South Dakota, despite television-transmitted mantras of the Democratic Party to stoke the fires of hatred and Identity Group politics.
Both Presidents Trump and Adams support a masculine way of celebrating Independence Day, with loud noises and pyrotechnics, if not of guns, then fireworks. Neither would wring their hands in sissy fashion worrying that someone might get hurt or that fires might start or that emphatic sounds might shake sleepy types out of their lethargies. We have to trust parental control and civic planning.
After all, fireworks support a relatively safe way for young people to get acculturated or used to the realities of military services which correctly rely on bombs and guns to defend against evil aggressors. Well-meaning parents shouldn’t attempt to overly shelter their children. Life should not be lived within the artificial scope of a computer game. Or as a victim.
Besides, parents and teachers should take full advantage of fireworks to teach more about concepts in science, everything from the Big Bang theory to the colors of elements and molecules introduced to flame. Make sparklers and chemistry great again!
