The 5th of July in Daily Thoughts, Ideas, and Experiences

Probably a lot of entries coming in today huh. Holidays always bring about a lot of thinking I suppose.
Every year the fourth makes me more and more sad.
The fourth of July is my mother’s clean and sober “birthday” and she celebrated 14 years yesterday. So the first fourths I remember were at the NA annual picnic down by the river that runs through my city. We had a handful of families that my mother knew and we would sit and read outside, watching people play catch or volleyball until it started to get dark. We would always bring our own food, but sometimes my mom would let us go to the ice cream truck as we heard it pull into the parking lot. Once it started to get dark people would start letting off little firecrackers on the sidewalk running through the park while my family would pack up our things and put them in the car. We would take our chairs down to the water and watch as folks would set off their own fireworks on the sand and into the water. We would watch the fireworks going off downtown across the river. It was fun, routine, safe.
But we stopped going a few years ago. I think the hassle of driving across town to see people we didn’t really talk to anymore wasn’t really worth it.
The place we live at now makes quite the event of it all. A couple of families buy a whole slew of fireworks and we all go up to the top of the street and set them off. Now the kids in my neighborhood are very energetic and actually quite rude. As soon as it starts getting dark they yell “when are you gonna do a good one?” and run up and down the street trying to catch a glimpse of fireworks going off all around. It’s good fun, makes me feel like a darn princess having decent manners and whatnot. This year my brother and I watched the kids run around stomping out the various fireworks, even the ones that weren’t from people in our neighborhood, and once things started dying down we went around and picked up the trash everyone left behind.
But that’s not what bothers me. The first bout of sadness I remember was the smoke and sulfur. The planet is so darn polluted and we add to it just for fun. This year, it rained a little which brought the smoke down and cleared the air but to just think of all that smoke and all the paper and plastic just introduced to the environment for fun.
Also to blindly celebrate our country? To enjoy controlled explosions for one or two nights while we subject people to fear for their lives every day? To ignore the racism, classism, sexism, and discrimination based on anything while singing praise of freedom, liberty, and our human rights?
It’s just so tired of it all. It feels like every year we forget everything and have to start over.