Fireworks

On the night of the Fourth of July we went to an outlook in a residential neighborhood on Queen Anne Hill to watch the fireworks. The city of Seattle is a light show in and of itself at night. Unlike a lot of other places I’ve been, it never really fades to black in the absence of the sunlight. Instead the rolling hills go to different hues of blue, deep shades of navy and sapphire and cobalt freckled with playful fireflies of light. They strike me as so unconscious of themselves, these pinpricks of iridescence; they wink at each other from behind the heavy brocade drapes of expensive mansions with the same innocent jocularity that they do the cheap plastic blinds of dilapidated basement apartments, and, in my overworked imagination, they laugh jovially at our inability to see past the difference between the two.

Every year, before colors begin exploding in space, a military helicopter with a giant American flag pinned to its belly makes a couple of strategic revolutions around the sky above Lake Union, a giant spotlight illuminating it from a barge below. The idea, one supposes, is the invocation of pride, a swelling of patriotic emotion, an overwhelming gratitude at having been born free.

This year, though, it was different. My first reaction wasn’t pride, it wasn’t patriotism, it was anger. And then it was anger that I had a reason to be angry. For some reason the Fourth of July is always a bit of an emotional holiday for me: standing underneath falling shards of glittering gunpowder for a half an hour always instantly takes me back to when I was a kid, to playing in the park with my brother and sister, singing silly songs about Henry the Eighth (I am I am!) and John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt while the giant blue and red explosions – much simpler then than they are now – cast long irregular shadows over the town.

As I grow older, I remember too how I was told as a child how lucky I was to be born an American. People here can be whatever they want, I was told. We can make a difference. We can change things if they need to be changed. And this is all because we’re free.

And I remember my grandfather last summer, talking to my best friend Lindsey as he sat rocking in his favorite chair, the naval tattoo on his arm faded from exposure to the years, saying, “I’ve always been a real flag-waver when it comes to our country.” And I remember feeling terribly proud.

And so as that arrogant helicopter strutting around with that arrogant flag strapped to its arrogant underside, I couldn’t help but feel betrayed. Lost. We don’t even try to be whatever we want (who has the money to pay for an education?). We’re skeptical of our ability to make a difference, and scared of what might happen if we do, so we don’t even try. And freedom? We’ve entered an age where criticism of our government is unpatriotic, and criticism of each other is mandatory. American community has become American isolation. American philanthropists have become American Enrons. The American dream has become the American trying-to-get-by. American hope has become American fear.

How dare they? I thought. The rich and powerful have taken what was once envisioned as a government for and by the people and used it to suffocate those it was meant to empower. How dare they ignore our poor? How dare they take the money meant to educate our children and put it toward a meaningless war? How dare they make political games out of the suffering of those in other countries? In our own? How dare they make me doubt my desire to create new life, at times even to live my own? How dare they turn their backs on the flat-wavers of this country, the grandfathers and fathers and mothers and aunts and uncles who have fought bravely, unquestioningly, nobly, and now find themselves – sometimes quite literally – without a leg to stand on?

And worst of all, how dare they rob us of our hope?

How do you impeach a government for the theft of optimism?

I stood there for a moment, seething. Disoriented. Wondering if this was even the same country in which I’d grown up, because really I recognize very little of it.

It wasn’t until I’d been standing there brooding in my self-righteousness for a few minutes that I realized that someone in the small crowd around us had been humming the national anthem softly as the flag passed. Someone else to my right was nodding – almost imperceptibly, but he was doing it – his eyes moist with tears. The closer the flag got, the more static the air around us became, until that great square of fabric hovered right in front of us. In the crowd of a hundred people, not one of us spoke. Even the drunk guy sitting in a lawn chair two rows up was momentarily dumbstruck.

What I realized standing there that night is this: we are not dead. Anesthetized, maybe, but not dead. Sometimes it’s easy to feel like we are; we watch the daily chaos on the news, the horror in Africa, the rising gas prices, the idiots in congress, the soaring prices of food, people losing their homes. And we feel lost because we can’t do anything about it. Not just for ourselves, but for others. We can’t help and we can’t make it better. So we go in one end of our day and out the other like zombies, numbed by our ineffectiveness, manipulated by our apathy. We look out on the world and all we see is gray. Gray, gray, gray.

But I think it’s also easy to forget how lucky we really are in spite of everything. My generation has only ever seen explosions in the sky in celebration of our freedom, never because we were fighting in pursuit of it. We have only ever had to associate the burning smell of gunpowder and charred meat with the lingering after-effects of a giant nationwide party. There are many, many people on earth who have far more sinister associations with such sensations.

I think, really, that deep down we know this. And I strongly believe that there is still something in us that dares to hope. However small, it is still there. And it will, I believe, transcend scandal and stupidity and greed and global warming. There is still a spark in each of us, a tiny grain of everything irrepressible about the human spirit, that clings to optimism, to the potential for good. But we have to make an effort to seek it out, and it’s going to take work. Barack Obama can offer us all the change he wants, but until we’re willing to work for it in our own lives, all the promises and all the blame of all the politicians and gurus and spiritual leaders in all the world can never hand it to us.

In America, the government is still the people, even if it is by a narrow margin. What I wonder is whether we will ever trust the government, no matter how brilliant, as long as we remain unable to trust ourselves.