This is just something I wrote down while waiting for the fireworks to begin this evening.

7/3/2007

Writing is something I do so infrequently… and it shows! In any case, say hello to the Ashland Fireworks!!! Aside from the excessive patriotism, the one thing I’ve noticed in particular is the proponderance of people wearing scowls. People-watching isn’t something I do on a regular basis, but it appears to be a way by which you can catch people mostly off-guard. Not entirely, of course, but enough so that you can see that people are fundamentally unhappy. I mean, I’m not perfectly happy, either, but I think I am coming much closer to finding out the core of it. The rest are details. This scene reminds me of a series of photos that were featured in this place I used to frequent for breakfast sandwiches. The owner was a fairly brusque character–I eventually stopped going there because of this–and there were photos of (I assume) his children, and these photos were so telling. In one photo, the tension inherent in the photos ran in increasing proportion from youngest to oldest. There were separate photos of the three, and a group photo of the three as well. The group photo appeared earlier than the individuals, and the difference was most marked in the youngest daughter. Sure, it could have been a bad day, she was in a bad mood, whatever. But the pattern was obvious. Right now, it is twenty of eight o’clock, and they’re piping march music through the loudspeakers. It sounds like a WWII newsreel here. Such sad, angry people. The more that come, the more sadness and anger I see. Only the smallest children–but not the infants–exhibit anything remotely like happiness. Let’s not even say anything about the trio of cops that trudge through the field… At an event that is otherwise patriotic, to see so many sad and angry people just is not surprising. The older the are, the more calcified their expressions. Fear, too. Worry. Lost. Regret. That will be it for my observations of the crowd. It is beginning to get too dark.

Other observations as the evening wore on:

They had a guy announcing the 50/50 raffle for about 90 minutes straight… it got kind of annoying pretty quickly, but the proceeds from that pay for part of the fireworks for next year. It looks like they raised over $1200 for next year from the raffle alone. But that was okay, really.

Right before the fireworks began, the guy with the microphone led the crowd in singing “God Bless America.” I think that it was at about this time that I decided that I should probably forego any future patriotic attendances. There was a guy next to me that was singing, saw that I wasn’t singing, and said, “C’mon, sing!” I kept silent… I don’t know if that was the right thing to do, but I just knew that I did not believe any of the parts of that song… I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe in “America” (certainly not in the way they mean it)… there’s just so much packed into that song that I just don’t believe, I can’t honestly sing it.

[Edited to add] – I had this really sickening feeling during the singing of that song… I recalled to my mind a scene from a movie (I think it was “Cabaret”) in which Germans were singing some Fatherland song… the setting was in the days right before Nazism hit into full swing and took the country by storm. Can you determine why I felt a sense of unease?

Then, of course, they had the singing of the national anthem. I happen to recall, a number of years ago, that the MC would generally say, “Please rise for the national anthem.” Now, however, they don’t even say that. They introduce the national anthem, and everybody in the crowd just automatically rises to their feet. I stayed seated… again, I’m not sure if that was the right thing to do, but I can say that I didn’t feel any problem with staying seated… I didn’t feel like I had to stand, I didn’t feel like I had to conform to the group… it was actually a rather benign feeling, one of–dare I say it–tranquility.

Finally, the fireworks. I should have gotten some earplugs or brought some earmuffs (even my nice computer headphones would have helped) because we were considerably closer to the fireworks than I’ve been in the past… and this year, after maybe 10 or 15 blasts, I decided that it would be prudent to preserve my hearing (my ears were beginning to hurt a little bit, too). As I watched the fireworks explode in the sky (most of them, anyway–at least two of them misfired, perhaps three… but the third one might have been designed that way), it occurred to me that this was a pretty silly ritual. I mean, here we all are, gathered in a field, to watch colors literally explode across the night sky. I’ve seen enough fireworks that I’m rarely impressed anymore, and they have become more boring, with a heavy emphasis on red, white, and blue.

I rather highly doubt I will attend any more patriotic fireworks displays. I certainly won’t stop anybody else from going, though if somebody makes a strong case as to why I ought to tag along, I might reconsider my stance… but it would have to be quite the strong case.

So, I’ve noticed over the years that my hairline is slowly receding, especially above the temples. It’s the pattern of baldness on my mother’s side, it would seem, and that’s the way the theory goes, so hey, that’s fine. But last night I had a dream in which I was much balder than I am now, except it was only on one side of my head–the left side, I think, and it was bald as far back as maybe my ear while the other side wasn’t nearly as bald. In the dream, I attributed the advanced baldness on the left side to another phenomenon I’ve noticed in my body, which is that the right side of my body, while dominant, appears to be slightly “older” than my left. That is, I started getting extra hair on the right side of my body before I got it on the left. How that works out to me balding on the left side of my head, however, I’m really not sure.

Proposition: The moral classification of “Family” is neither “good” nor “evil,” but “non-moral.”

I’m not exactly an expert in syllogistical proof or anything, so I’m just going to try to reason this out.

In order to prove the proposition, we can attempt to prove the negative and see where that gets us.

The negative gets split into two possibilities:

• The moral classification of “Family” is “good.”
• The moral classification of “Family” is “evil.”

Let us deal with “evil” first. If Family is evil, then since human beings are moral creatures by nature, they should be avoiding Family relationships at all costs. To put it another way, people who remained in family relationships would be subject to fairly harsh social sanctions. This is obviously not what happens, so it seems rather unlikely that Family is evil.

If Family is good, then all relationships within any Family structure must also be good. This means that the interaction between a parent and child is good, and that the interaction between siblings is good, and so on. This can also apply to adoptions and remarriages and so on.

All it really takes to disprove this is one example of a mother abandoning her child or a father chronically neglecting his child. One does not need to go too far afield to find such examples (you might even look at the author for both).

The above relationships I have described cannot be considered morally good in any way, shape, or form. Such actions of a parent to the child are incredibly evil due to the disparity of power of the parent over the child. Hence, Family cannot be considered morally good.

This means that Family is morally neutral. To put it another way, Family, by itself, is not good nor evil. Most definitions of Family involve strict biological relationships, but they are usually extended to adoptions and remarriages. However, given that no child chooses to be born and that rarely do children have a say in the case of adoptions or remarriages, the argument above does not change. In this way, Family relationships are not obligatory to be pursued or to be avoided. These relationships must be evaluated at the level of personal virtue.

Another way of stating the above is that any supposed virtue of the Family must yield to the empirically verifiable virtue of those that consist Family relationships.

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