July 4th, 2009

As I lay on a towel, surrounded by friends, the lights flashed. A shot, a whistling, an explosion, a crackle. Lather, rinse, repeat. Fireworks in a nutshell, an Independence day tradition begun in 1777. We've celebrated every birthday since the Declaration was signed, and in true American fashion: defiantly. We claim our nation's birth happened on the day we realized its conception, rather than on the day it was physically born and recognized by others.

And we celebrate it with explosives; candles on a grand scale.

A quote I read online the day before struck me as I watched - "Destruction is the purest form of art." An artillery shell fired with a resounding "pop," and I followed the little ball high into the sky, starry and filled with smoke. At the peak of its journey, like a tiny kamikaze pilot who had reached his destination, the ball erupted in a flash of light, leaving only smoke in its wake (smoke that didn't seem to bother any of us, my environmentalist self included this time).

And yet there was something more left in its wake.

Every ball burst into something new with its destruction, something new and something actually beautiful. I realized that there, in that place, lying on the ground surrounded by friends as we stood back and watched the fireworks, celebrating something that is both distinctly American and universally human, destrudtion and creation were coming together, overlapping, one leading to another in a way we rarely see. Each firework embellished the sky with color in a self destructive blast that created an impact, a message. Pure, brutal, destructive, artistic.

And for once, the quote was true.

Metaphorically, the fireworks transcend even giant candles crowning a giant cake of America. They're symbolic of "the bombs bursting in air," the battle that had to be fought before America the idea could become America the nation. They're symbolic of how our country is founded on the dismantling of a system. Like the way a phoenix bursts into flames to be born again from the ashes, they're symbolic of how sometimes, destruction is the purest form of creation.