Fourth Freedom

It's the 3rd of July! Another year passed, another summer here. More hot, humid days and nights to come. Vacations, summer school is over, Vacation Bible School is here, baseball season in full swing. Time to head to the creek or the pool. Pull weeds, pick corn, tomatoes and eat all the watermelon you can hold. Time to celebrate...wait, one more day for the official Independence Day celebration, even though popping and cracking have been going on all around for a week.
I always imagine it is kids shooting them off, but maybe not. If it is kids, what are they celebrating? Freedom of course. Freedom to do something deemed illegal the rest of the year. Freedom to play with matches and to blow things up without the threat of seriously harming someone. But mainly freedom of experience. Freedom to do something just for the fun of it, without any other justification. That is true freedom.
Growing up we didn't get to spend much money on fireworks, so we mostly bought firecrackers. Most bang for your buck. A pack of 100 meant lots of pops and the ability to completely destroy large ant hills and still have ammo left. Yes, of course it meant blowing up plastic army men and seeing how high a tin can would go relative to how many firecrackers were under it. This was freedom to commit wanton destruction, as long as we did not turn the power against each other. Freedom meant restraint. Restraint from throwing a lit firecracker at your brother or any person. Restraint in the area of conservation, we only had so many pops and so we had to make them last, very rarely did we set off a whole string of firecrackers at once, how wasteful was that.
Now that I have a little more money of my own, more than when I was 12, I find that freedom and restraint often become excess. And with grown kids and young grandkids, excess has a whole new upper limit. Anyway, I now have greater freedom to celebrate the 4th of July. In combination we have had fireworks displays at Windrock that lasted an hour and would have rivaled any put on by the local Lions Club back in the 1960's.
So we celebrate the Independence of our country, that is true. But maybe you are a little like me , and find that down deep, I'm really celebrating the freedom of self, the ability to do something different without the judgment of others. Celebrating and doing something just for the fun of it with restraint of course.
Peace.