Dear Independence Celebrators:

Fourth of July 1975 was the year I learned the deeper meaning of fireworks. That spring, my parents had sponsored the Vans, a Vietnamese family of nine who lived with us until my mom and dad found a rental home for them in another neighborhood in Omaha. We helped settle them with donated furniture and household items, and my mother chauffeured the children to schools and helped their mom negotiate American grocery shopping.

To me, July 4th was about fireworks. During daylight hours, firing M-80s into the sky with a wrist-rocket slingshot or having team bottle-rocket battles between the dugouts at the park was, in hindsight, not the safest way to pass a summer day, but it was magnificently fun! Dusk was reserved for sparklers and smoke bombs, and darkness was the domain of skyrockets, Roman candles, pinwheels, fountains and wiz-bangs. (Note to any child reading this musing: Fun in the olden days was significantly more dangerous. I indeed had friends missing sight in one eye or the end of a finger, and a few with disfiguring burns, but casualties at playtime were more liberally tolerated before the invention of common sense.)

While I was aware that all these fireworks, firecrackers and explosives had something remotely to do with the “rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air,” my juvenile brain did not connect our recreational pyrotechnics with warfare. That was until Dai Van, the Vietnamese family’s father, called my dad and in hurried broken English tried to find out why a military battle had broken out in their new neighborhood. It wasn’t funny; my dad was horrified. Somehow the soundtrack of our celebration was the background noise of their worst nightmare. Their family was hunkered down in their basement, sobbing; having escaped war in Vietnam, they feared they had landed in the middle of some North American armed insurrection. Fearing conscription, their oldest son was vomiting in the bathroom.

My father frantically contacted a missionary friend of our family who was fluent in Vietnamese. He called the Vans and assured them this was an American party, not a civil crisis. Turns out, every bi-lingual Vietnamese/English speaker in the country was making the same phone call to countless refugee households.

Days later, our families gathered for a backyard picnic. The Vans attempted to laugh off their anxiety and assured my parents they were not to blame for not pre-warning them, but they never warmed up to celebrating independence with the cacophonous noise of pseudo-war.

I recall thinking differently about freedom and its costs. Somehow the Fourth of July took on an entirely different sense for me. We celebrate all the trappings of a war for independence—flags, parades, rockets, missiles and bombs—but sanitized for entertainment, bereft of displacement, destruction, injury and death. I still love a great fireworks display, but in a very different dawn’s early light.

We should live in deep gratitude for the innocence that allows us to associate explosion with festivity, and we should ignite active compassion for those who cannot disentangle the noise of the day from the news of their lives.

Hopefully growing in common sense, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor