Seriiously, should we be surprised by this opinion at the Times by Margarent Renkl? It seems there is always some sort of crank doing this yearly, and, by crank, I mean a Democrat. Do you ever see Republicans saying “nah, no more fireworks or burgers or hot dogs”?
Enough With the Fireworks Already
For 15 straight years, our old dog Clark — a hound/shepherd/retriever mix who was born in the woods and loved the outdoors ever after — spent the Fourth of July in our walk-in shower. He seemed to believe a windowless shower in a windowless bathroom offered his best chance of surviving the shrieking terror that was raining down from the night sky outside. (snip through many paragraphs about pets being upset over fireworks)
And those were all companion animals, the ones whose terror is clear to us. We have no real way of knowing how many wild animals suffer because the patterns of their lives are disrupted with no warning every year on a night in early July. People shooting bottle rockets in the backyard might not see the sleeping songbirds, startled from their safe roosts, exploding into a darkness they did not evolve to navigate — crashing into buildings or depleting crucial energy reserves. People firing Roman candles into the sky above the ocean may have no idea that the explosions can cause seabirds to abandon their nest or frighten nesting shorebirds to death.
Then there’s the wildlife driven into roads — deer and foxes, opossums and skunks, coyotes and raccoons. Any nocturnal creature in a blind panic can find itself staring into oncoming headlights, unsure whether the greater danger lies in the road or in the sky or in the neighborhood yards surrounding them.
Appealing to emotion, when, the reality is that Democrats just look for excuses to stop Other People from enjoying Independence Day, because Democrats hate America. And Margaret whines about guns, of course. But, wait, it’s 3pm. What do I usually post at 3pm?
Addressing climate change and biodiversity loss on a planet with eight billion human residents won’t be simple. How to grow affordable food without using petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides that poison pollinators, for example, is a challenge. How to build enough housing for human beings without also disrupting natural ecosystems is a challenge. Such things are doable, though they won’t be easy.
But there are easy things we can do at no real cost to ourselves. We can eat more vegetables and less animal protein. We can cultivate native plants. We can seek out products that aren’t packaged in plastic, spend less time in cars and airplanes, raise the thermostat in the summer and lower it in the winter. As Dr. Kimmerer points out in “The Serviceberry,” her forthcoming book, “We live in a time when every choice matters.”
Somehow we went from “fireworks are scary to animals” to the climate crisis scam. No, totally not a cult, where it has to be dragged into everything.
The conflation of selfishness with patriotism is the thing I have the hardest time accepting about our political era. Maybe we have the right to eat a hamburger or drive the biggest truck on the market or fire off bottle rockets deep into the night on the Fourth of July, but it doesn’t make us good Americans to do such things. How can it possibly be “American” to look at the damage that fireworks can cause — to the atmosphere, to forests, to wildlife, to our own beloved pets, to ourselves — and shrug?
The truly American thing would be to join together to make every change we can reasonably make to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, human and other-than-human alike. The truly American thing would be to plant a victory garden large enough to encompass the entire natural world.
Well, that’s what you believe, Margaret. That’s not what the rest of us think. Mind your own f’ing business.
Read: NY Times Wants You To Stop Using Fireworks On Independence Day »
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