My dog spends the first week of July in the bathtub. He trembles under the plastic curtain, pressed into the cold porcelain like it might protect him from a nation that only knows how to scream. He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t sleep. He flinches at shadows. On the Fourth, when the bombs crescendo—when someone sets off a full commercial-grade artillery shell in the vacant lot two blocks down—he pisses himself. Then he tries to hide inside the wall. We’ve reinforced the baseboards because he has literally tried to dig through the drywall in panic.
He’s not a special dog. He’s not a rescue from a war zone. He’s a mutt who likes peanut butter and chasing squirrels in Prospect Park. But like every other animal who has the misfortune of living among us, he knows that when things go boom, someone is about to die. The deer in the woods run headlong into fences. Birds abandon their nests. Horses gallop into traffic. Shelter intakes spike. On July 5, America dumps tens of thousands of terrified strays into a collapsing system and moves on, pretending we’ve done something worth celebrating.
We are not celebrating anything. We are participating in a performative trauma ritual for a state that cannot deliver on a single one of its promises. We are not free. We are not well. We are not safe. We are not number one in anything but self-harm.
Number one in civilian gun ownership per capita. Number one in mass shootings. Number one in COVID deaths. Number one in incarcerated population. Number one in car crash fatalities among wealthy nations. Number one in belief in angels, UFOs, and QAnon. Number one in military spending, police killings, prescription drug costs, and student debt.
But sure—let’s light something on fire and call it pride.
What are we celebrating? That we have no national healthcare? That a third of our infrastructure is crumbling? That our public transit systems are an international joke, our teachers underpaid, our minimum wage frozen in amber, our life expectancy declining, our climate policy dictated by the quarterly earnings reports of fossil fuel companies? Are we really so high on spectacle that we forget the stage is rotting beneath us?
This isn’t about politics, but about pathology. It’s about the fact that the only way this country knows how to feel is through violence. We can’t even throw a party without declaring war on the air.
And it is war. If you’ve never felt the walls shake from an M-80 going off twenty feet away, if you’ve never held your dog’s ribcage and felt it rattle like a snare drum from fear, then maybe you think this is about inconvenience. Maybe you think fireworks are nostalgic, harmless, fun. But nostalgia is a weapon. And we’ve turned it on every living thing in range.
No other industrialized country sets its sky on fire to prove it exists. This is a uniquely American sickness: explosive patriotism, weaponized joy, all wrapped in a red-white-and-blue consumer fantasy that dares you to question it. Fireworks are illegal in several states, but somehow they’re everywhere. We regulate reality television more tightly than we do handheld explosives. Because freedom, apparently, means nothing if it’s not deafening.
Every year, millions of Americans tell themselves it’s tradition. That it’s about liberty, independence, the founding fathers. But it’s not. It’s about spectacle. It’s about noise. It’s about drowning out the quiet voice in your head that says, “This doesn’t feel like a celebration. This feels like a lie.”
The truth is, the people most desperate to remind you how free you are are usually the ones who benefit most from your submission. Fireworks are the bread and circuses of a declining empire, the audiovisual language of a country that can no longer afford health insurance but will gladly set its own neighborhoods ablaze to feel like it’s still in charge.
Meanwhile, my dog is still in the tub. And I am sitting beside him, wondering why a country that claims to love freedom makes so many of its inhabitants live in fear.