On the fireworks
Every night, or even in the afternoon and mid-day, we hear explosions. The explosions are sometimes a singular big boom. Other times there are multiple booms in quick succession. There are bristlings and frazzlings and frizzlings and the pew pew pew of shooting sounds like lasers.
The sounds go for a long time. They’ve been keeping me up at night. Luckily Thisbe and Shelly don’t wake up at them.
When I hear them I get nervous. A tension in my chest. The sound is intense. It’s celebratory but also a show of strength. It’s a summer ritual but also something blowing up.
Fireworks are reminiscent of war but also they’re not war at all, just loud and colorful and awesome. No one gets hurt, but it sounds like a bomb. Our dog cowers at them. People cheer. There’s something significant about this mixture of feeling, something right and something wrong, something embodied in the fireworks: an increased pleasure in the explosion; a monster joy; a meaningful, significant recklessness; something deeply and powerfully resounding.
They’ve been more intense since the Floyd rebellions, but they started when it got warm and spring turned to summer. There were always fireworks around this time, but mostly on the weekends or special occasions. Not every night and not during the day.
In a recent short article on the #phillyexploisions, the local Fox News channel interviewed a fireworks dealer in nearby Delaware. He says that people have been buying more fireworks because they have more free time and “because of the situation.”
He means the pandemic. There’s increased demand. My housemate even says that ice cream trucks are selling them now.
The increase in demand makes sense to me given the ‘situation’. People are out of work or working from home. Everything’s been cancelled. Rent is due, water bills, electric bills, food bills. They’re piling up. Powder keg.
A family member or multiple family members are sick. Friends are sick, or worried about getting sick. No one has healthcare. Everyone had debt they couldn’t pay off already before the shutdown. And all the distractions are gone: sports, music, movies, restaurants, theme parks.
Who knows when jobs are coming back, if stores or bars or movie theaters will come back. Somehow everything before March 15th is the “before times.” But some new money is coming in from the government, unemployment checks, paycheck protection supplements, a little more to spend than usual and more time and more space than usual.
Then the rebellions pealed through society. Anger, frustration, confusion, exhaustion over white supremacy all built up. Seems like it would make sense that people want to blow shit up. I wonder if the gun powder in the fireworks is white.
Society is getting blown up by the pandemic so it makes sense, but also maybe society should be blown up but also, it’s society. It’s ours. It’s theirs. The society that is hurting us but also keeping us alive each day.
So some people want to celebrate. They want to shout out. They want to make a big noise, see colors and light and fire. They don’t want to hurt anyone but they want to feel something and maybe make something known.
There are a lot of ideologies riding those big noises. Of course there’s been debate about whether it’s ATMs, psyops, or some kind of conspiracy.
But I think it’s the sound of the working class in the pandemic dialectic.
And so I’ve been saying ‘they’ and not ‘we’. I have to note that I don’t want to set off fireworks. I don’t like fireworks generally and I’m not exactly called to them in this moment. But maybe it’s not my class position. I’m not under the pressures, in the cultures, in the crucibles where these fireworks are going off.
So they feel like an ‘other’ to me, which makes me even more nervous. But I’m not complaining. I can feel a solidarity with what I interpret these fireworks to be and represent: the boom of the dialectic where it grates and grinds–and explodes–most.