Rusty Saber: Celebrations out of touch with meaning

Deadlines being what they are, this is being written prior to Independence Day, more commonly known as the Fourth of July. However, it won't be published until the holiday has come and gone. Hopefully, it will be fresh enough in readers' memory banks that this column will be current. The Fourth of July is a lone holiday the summer has to offer.

Along with Christmas and New Year's Day, it is celebrated on a specific date regardless of the day of the week on which it may fall. Many so-called holidays are moved around to create three-day weekends. Can you imagine celebrating the Fourth of July on July 3? I can't, even if it would allow for a three-day weekend.

I have mixed feelings about Fourth of July celebrations not with the holiday, but the celebrations. The festivities most associated with it are picnics and fireworks, neither of which ranks high among my favorite things.

As I see it, if God had intended us to eat outside, he wouldn't have put the kitchen indoors. Think about it: The kitchen is the most expensive room in most homes; those modern appliances, gadgets and the like are costly. What do we do? We eat in the backyard. I see no reason to leave the comfort of the expensively equipped kitchen to go outside to eat, sweat, and fight ants, chiggers, ticks, flies, mosquitoes and the rest of what the great outdoors offers. The only thing that appeals to me less than a picnic in mid-summer would be a picnic in mid-winter.

Even as a child, I wasn't much interested in fireworks. Call me a tightwad, but even in those halcyon days of my youth, I could find all sorts of better ways to spend my money than to burn it up. As an adult, nothing has happened to cause me to change my mind.

I'm not one who says, "Gee, it's the birthday of my country, I think I'll spend $100 on some stuff that might blow my hand off or set the house on fire."

The fact that it's illegal for fireworks to be sold or set off in Springfield's city limits is an indicator of it's redeeming social value. Sorry, but I don't understand why the birthday of the nation should be an excuse to burn up a bunch of money on fireworks. Having said all this, I'll put up with picnics and fireworks on the Fourth of July. It's so rare for patriotism to be cool, to be politically correct, that I'll go outside to eat and breathe the acrid odor of spent fireworks to participate in some good old fashioned "God Bless America" patriotism.

My detrimental comments about fireworks don't necessarily apply to professionally done Fourth of July fireworks displays, such as Firefall. Fireworks and patriotic music in unison designed as a gigantic happy birthday card to America is a lot different from Uncle Filbert or little Ralphie setting off a string of 1,000 firecrackers, terrorizing dogs for miles around. That doesn't have much to do with patriotism.

By the time this Rusty Saber hits the streets, I will have survived the annual holiday picnic (outside the Springfield city limits) and my eardrums and sinuses will have survived the gunpowder-filled air. I will have celebrated by proudly wearing a T-shirt with an American flag on the front. Somebody will sing "America the Beautiful;" I'll sweat a lot, and spill the contents of my plate all over my flag adorned T-shirt while swatting at an unidentified critter that was in the process of taking a chunk out of my arm.

I just hope that everyone remembered that the actual name of the holiday is Independence Day, the anniversary of the nation's Declaration of Independence. It was the act that created this great country. It may be more politically correct to find fault with America than to get all gushy in patriotic praise, but, what the heck, Regular Rusty Readers know the disdain I have for political correctness.

America isn't perfect, but it is a great country. No guards patrol our borders and seacoasts to keep people from leaving; the same can't be said for people wanting to enter.

The Fourth of July is a great holiday. It must be, I'll celebrate it doing things I don't want to do 'll love every minute of it.

(Joe McAdoo is former chairman of the communication department at Drury University and a Springfield public relations consultant.)