All my life, the 4 th of July has been a happy, almost frivolous, holiday. When I was a child, parents bought tons of firecrackers and we kids played with them for days leading up to the 4 th. We put them under cans and blew the cans sky high. We put them in the ends of pipes to get the big echoing noise that produced. We put a lot of them under an overturned container loaded with sand from our sandpile and watched it shoot up and throw sand all around.
That sort of play would appall most parents today. They would be sure our parents, who were indoors, ignoring us as we played all day long without supervision, were derelict in their duties for turning a bunch of kids loose with fireworks for days at a time.
But nobody got hurt, at least not among me and my playmates. And we had soooo much fun. That was a different America then. People were not so crazy. They were also a lot more patriotic. My parents grew up half-starved and desperate in the Great Depression.
Then, they had to fight World War II. I knew a lot of men who were walking on clanky false legs or who had visible scars on their bodies from wounds received in combat saving the world from fascism in Europe and Asia. My parents knew freedom was not free. They understood things like the necessity of holding presidents liable to the same laws that everyone else must follow because the men among them had seen the death camps, witnessed the ravages of the Japanese occupations, and watched as their friends died in combat.
Mama told me about it. She said he told her that, hard as it was to remember the horrors of combat, thinking about what he saw in that camp was worse. Fifty million people died because fallen clergy of two faiths β Shintoism and Buddhism in Japan and Christianity in Europe β sold their souls to fascism. Fifty million people died because the moneyed classes in two great countries acted in untrammeled greed and threw the power of their gold behind psychopaths.
