It's that time of year

I'm feeling particularly cranky this morning. Maybe it's because we're approaching July, my birth month. Another year older and deeper in snark?

As another celebration of the Fourth rolls around, in many parts of the country gunshot-like sounds can be heard, explosion-like flashes will be seen. Fireworks stands spring up like weeds. They sprout, bloom, wither and die all within a week or two.

What's left where I live, is a landscape littered with the aftermath of spent mini-munitions just outside the city limits--if we're lucky. If we're unlucky, we're left with blackened scars on a tinder dry land.

It's all part of America's love and tradition with pyrotechnics, from Roman candles to bunker busters. It's just good business. Never mind the litter of spent sparklers on roadsides, shattered nerves of animals or worse on much grander scales.

I wonder why explosives as toys or bombs as weapons are counted as part of the Gross National Product? (Product, production, productivity implies the creation of something useful, of something "productive," doesn't it?) I mean, the sole purpose of explosives is to blow up and in the process destroy shit. But I digress.

Happy Fourth of July everybody!