Exploding Cynicism

Fireworks have always made me cringe. As a five-year-old growing up in Nebraska, I had three fears: bees, junebugs, and firecrackers. Bees, for obvious reasons; junebugs, for the way they would smother our neighbor’s screen door like something out of a horror movie; and fireworks, for their startling, deafening, belly-shaking explosions, which would send my younger siblings screaming back into the house.

Neatly ticking them off on my fingers, I felt safe in their precise containment in my small hand. By carefully categorizing my fears, I reasoned, I could keep them at bay.

Years later, fireworks no longer trigger alarm, but they’re troubling in new ways. Slickly commercialized to promote extravagant sales of flags and red-white-and-blue everything, the Fourth of July is yet another holiday packaged for purchase from the shelves of drugstores. To honor my yearly obligation to stand beneath symbolic “bombs bursting in air,” last Friday I reluctantly joined the crowds in Astoria Park to watch the annual fireworks display over the East River.

It was a typical scene. The lights vaulted across the sky in time to the requisite patriotic soundtrack: Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” Each electric blossom was more elaborate than the last—dazzling pyrotechnic choreography designed to inspire solemn patriotic ruminations.

As a child, I felt unqualified pride in my country; as an educated adult, allegiance is often more difficult to pledge. Botched elections, executive lies, and governmental scandal plague our contemporary political landscape—not to mention a war that many of us would rather not be fighting. The word “American,” if not exactly a pejorative term, has become something of a liability, thanks to our troubled global reputation.

But standing alongside the richly diverse throngs of Americans in Astoria Park, surrounded by intergenerational immigrant families, the calibrated explosives began to blast away a chunk of my cynicism. At once, I felt helplessly proud of this place we call home.

Transplanted from Albania, Mexico, Greece, the Sudan, and elsewhere across the world, many of my neighbors arrived here to seek, if not huge wealth, a safer and more comfortable existence than the life they knew before. A home where, for instance, the sound of explosives is not a commonplace event.

How lucky we are to live in a place where these piercing blasts are an occasion for celebration, not panic. The young Hispanic girl beside me released blood-curdling screams inspired by sheer joy and amazement, not primal terror.

Maybe, for one day at least, it’s better to let go of the complications and focus on the basics. “I’m proud to be an American,” Greenwood vows, “where at least I know I’m free.”

I once worried that the fireworks’ bright embers would strike me; later, I recognized their triumphant streaks as patriotism slyly manipulated for public consumption. Watching this year’s display, I looked away from the spectacle and directly into the illuminated faces surrounding my own. We were united not only by the glowing necklaces we had purchased from an enterprising vendor, but also in a collective hope of what America can be. And for that moment, our country was displaying its powers safely, and beautifully, high above our heads.