Why do we like to watch controlled explosions while sitting on a blanket eating potato salad?

 Jon Winokur

Something in us responds to fireworks. The Chinese, who invented fireworks in the ninth century by packing gunpowder into bamboo stalks, originally used them to scare away evil spirits. Fire, noise, and light deployed against an invisible threat? The formula hasn’t changed in a thousand years.

July 4th fireworks are the most contradictory of traditions. They distress veterans, terrorize family dogs, start wildfires, and send thousands of people, mostly children, to the emergency room every year. Fireworks closely mimic combat sounds. The irony is palpable: We honor military service by recreating the sounds of war. The VA acknowledges fireworks as a significant PTSD trigger. Veterans’ groups have lobbied for “quiet zones” and advance notice of displays.

For dogs, July 4th is a horror movie in which the monster arrives on schedule, every year. An estimated forty to fifty percent of dogs show significant fear responses to fireworks. A dog’s hearing is roughly four times more sensitive than a human’s, which means what we experience as a festive boom registers to them as something closer to a detonation. They have no framework for fireworks, no way to contextualize the noise, no access to the concept of patriotism. They experience it as pure, inexplicable terror. They cower in bathtubs, escape through gates, doors, and windows. Because they’re utterly terrified, they run as fast as they can until they are lost.

Fireworks cause hundreds of wildfires annually. Consumer fireworks are illegal in most of California, where drought conditions can turn a sparkler into a firestorm. Fireworks release heavy metals including barium, strontium, copper, and lead. Studies show particulate levels increasing from 40 to 100 percent on July 4th, and air quality near fireworks displays briefly exceeding levels associated with serious health risk.

Of the twelve thousand ER visits annually from fireworks injuries, most involve children under 15. Hands and eyes are the most common injury sites. Fireworks also damage hearing. The sustained noise of a professional display — 150 decibels at close range — exceeds the threshold for immediate acoustic injury.

Why do we like to watch controlled explosions while sitting on a blanket eating potato salad? Maybe it’s the thrill of danger without (we think) the danger. Or maybe what we celebrate on the Fourth is not simply independence. Repeated surveys show that most Americans cannot accurately say what happened on July 4th, 1776. Maybe what we celebrate is the bang itself: the flash, the boom, the short, collective gasp of a crowd ooh-ing and ah-ing at the spectacle.

If the bang itself is the real attraction, then criticizing it is un-American. Zoë Heller reveals the unwritten rule: You may hate the circus; you may not hate fireworks. To confess boredom or indifference in the presence of an exploding sky is to mark yourself as a person deficient in wonder, in patriotism, in joy itself — a pariah, as she says, standing apart from the communal gasp while everyone else tilts their faces upward and registers the requisite amazement. But why is the contract so binding? Why fireworks, and not, say, parades, or marching bands, or any of the other things by which child-like delight in life is supposedly measured? Maybe because fireworks are the only one of these rituals built on real, if remote, danger. The thrill is not the spectacle but the faint possibility that something could go wrong. That’s what makes the silence about its costs so hard to break.

The backlash is already underway. More than a dozen states now ban or significantly restrict consumer fireworks, and the list grows each year. Cities that once anchored their Fourth of July identity in professional displays are quietly replacing them with drone shows, synchronized fleets of lighted drones that trace shapes in the sky in silence. While drones don’t provide the same experience, they’re precise where fireworks are chaotic, silent where fireworks are deafening, orderly where fireworks are momentarily spectacular.

It’s time for the rest of the country to catch up. Not because fireworks aren’t beautiful, but because the calculation has changed. We know more than we did about PTSD, about wildfire risk, about particulate matter, about what a dog hears when a shell goes off blocks away. We know that the annual injury toll is predictable, preventable, and concentrated in children. We know that the communal experience that fireworks provide can be approximated, if not replicated, by other means.

The Fourth will survive the transition. The republic has outlasted larger adjustments to its rituals. What we claim to celebrate—liberty, independence, resilience—doesn’t need a detonator. It merely requires that we acknowledge who is not celebrating with us: the veteran in the basement, the dog under the bed, the child in the emergency room, and the family watching their neighborhood burn. Jon Winokur