4th of July

I had the misfortune of going to not one, but two fireworks displays this year. I was sitting there watching the second yesterday night when it dawned at me that the whole tradition is incredibly stupid. You take these rockets, worth hundreds of dollars each and blow them up repeatedly. Sure some displays have bigger and louder fireworks than others, but in the end they all amount to doing the same thing over and over. You launch a couple fireworks, they explode, wait a couple seconds, and do it again. The crowd ooohs and aaaahs, as if each firecracker wasn’t perfectly identical to the 352 previous ones, not to mention the ones they saw the past year, and every year before that since they were a child. There are really only 4 or 5 basic types, each in different colors, exploding at different heights, but from the reactions of the viewers (and I don’t mean just the children either, from them it would be acceptable) you would think each one was some new and rare find.
I know these displays are usually set to music (invariably the 1812 overture) but I’ll be damned if I have ever once listened to the station that plays the music along with the fireworks (and I have listened a few times) and found any correlation between the two. If they shot them off completely at random I doubt anyone could tell the difference. To me the whole thing would be better if the guys running the show just said “fuck the music” and lit them all off at once, resulting in some sort of mushroom cloud and perhaps a downed 747.
It just seems to me that in a nation with rampant crime, an unacceptable poverty level, and 40 million people without health insurance, and an ever inflating budget deficit that we could find a better use than the millions spent on these things every year. I read that in 1998 4th of July fireworks caused an estimated $15.6 million in property damage alone. I don’t see what is so patriotic about taking that much money and blowing it up. I am pretty sure that I would have grown up to be much the same adult that I am today if I didn’t get to see some explosions once a year as a child.
As a general rule I never complain about a problem without proposing a solution. So what should we do with the money wasted on this? Bumfights! That’s correct, Bumfights. We pay homeless people $10,000 each to fight each other, then videotape it and sell the DVDs, using the proceeds to pay for more. Then by the end you will have eradicated homelessness, and some of the tougher bums might even wind up millionaires, fighting Mike Tyson in Madison Square Garden. So we could entertain the masses just as much as fireworks and end homelessness at the same time. It’s a win-win situation if you ask me.