“Happy Independence Day. … You are perfectly welcome to celebrate freedom, as long as you do it in chains. TV and radio nags, most of them government-empowered one way or another, spoil the day for weeks in advance by preaching over and over that ‘you’ll shoot your eye out’ if you try to enjoy your own fireworks, and that everything else you might happen to love about the day — especially your Fourth of July barbecue — will give you a heart attack, cancer, or (despite the First Amendment’s guarantee to freedom from religion) somehow despoil and offend the Earth Mother Goddess. In this best of collectivist worlds, all joy must be shared equally — or strictly prohibited. Hence enormous municipal socialist fireworks displays that entertain the media-numbed and publicly educated, while obliterating the true meaning of the Fourth of July completely.” (07/06/08)