300 million lbs of fireworks and 2.7 billion dollars gone in a cloud of smoke.
As a veteran with PTSD, I agree
My uncle came back from Vietnam with really bad PTSD (among other problems like alcoholism). Every fourth he would spend the whole day/night in the basement with the curtains drawn (to block out the flashes) and headphones on with the sound turned all the way up (to block out the sounds).
He would also take my cousins to buy fireworks every year.
I don’t mean to minimize your struggle, I just thought the juxtaposition was interesting.
I hope you could work through your struggles. I’m happy to say he was able to. He was able to quit drinking and minimize the effects of his PTSD. By the end of his life he was out there watching us shoot off the fireworks.
Were you drafted?
edit: by the time I got to this comment, I was thinking of this thread as being about “Should fireworks be banned?”
I’d be very opposed to a volunteer soldier arguing people’s freedoms should be taken away on account of their PTSD. I’m not sorry about that.
But I am sorry that I didn’t read this carefully enough to notice this person wasn’t arguing for a ban at all. Just saying their opinion on fireworks.
The military is the only form of upward mobility for large swaths of the population, they are chewed up and spit out by the machine, after being indoctrinated in nationalist propaganda from the time they were able to form memories. Veterans are members of the Prolitariat and should be educated about the system that abused them, not mocked and rediculed for being a victim of it. Yes America has committed mass atrocities, but almost every service member who signed up was completely unaware of that at the time of their enlistment.
It’s not about atrocities at all. It’s a question of whether kids understand that they are signing up for a job that involves using explosives to kill people. It’s kinda hard ignore that aspect of what the military is, no matter how sheltered or propagandized one is. As the propaganda has grown, so has the ability of literally any child to google “what do militaries do?”
Being aware of the atrocities might require someone to have been paying attention at some point in school, but knowing that you’re gonna face bombs and killing in the military, that takes even less awareness.
