Tonight, as I drive past flocks of sky-gazing spectators, it strikes me: this is the closest most of us ever get to war, this choreographed sequence of colorful chemical combustion.
Meanwhile, North Korea launches its seventh ballistic missile of the day into the Sea of Japan, and NORAD security alert climbs to “Bravo-Plus” status. One day before, North Korea threatens to counter a pre-emptive U.S. attack with nuclear war.
In what’s being called “a major escalation,” an Israeli airstrike hits the Palestinian Interior Ministry building. The same building was attacked last week. In other local news, another Israeli airstrike hits a university in Gaza City, while a Palestinian rocket plows into an Israeli school.
In Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, two buses carrying government workers are bombed during morning rush hour. Insurgent violence, including ambushes, assassinations, and suicide bombings, is at its worst there since the Taliban was overthrown five years ago.
And these are just the big CNN headlines. Just today. Not even to mention Iraq.
Yet, here we are, safely insulated from the outside world, and drenched in the irony of celebrating our nation’s birth by watching all these impotent imitation bombs bursting in air. All these harmless crackles and pops, relentlessly provoking the car alarms on our military grade SUV tanks. Watching this sulfur cloud descend upon us like nuclear winter in some low-budget sci-fi flick.
Our little Hollywood dramatization, censored safe and sound for TV, without all the danger and dread. Just good old-fashioned American entertainment. Fun for the whole family. Our fake little war, the play we put on so that we don’t feel so left out of all that action.
After all, it’s probably the closest we’ll ever get.