The Bozeman Fireworks Debate On Social Media Is Comedy Gold.

The 4th of July! A day we celebrate freedom, fun, and everything America.

It's one of the most popular Holidays and without a doubt, the most American. Most countries celebrate Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Easter, and all of the others.  But only the good ole United States celebrate the 4th of July.

All over Montana and the nation, folks will come together to have cookouts, play games, drink beer, and of course shoot fireworks.  It's a tradition that we've been participating in for a couple of hundred years, and God willing, we'll be doing it for several hundred more.

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Having said all that, and I am in no way trying to damper your Holiday festivities, I just wanted to point something out that I found to be a bit ironic.

If you spend any time on social media, specifically Facebook, maybe you've come across a page called "The Real Ask Bozeman".  People ask questions in hopes of getting a legitimate answer, but that can be hard to come by sometimes.  A lot of it turns into mud-slinging, insults, and some political diatribe where people pick sides depending on which "team" they associate with, shoot off talking points they heard from their favorite news channel and it all looks rather childish.

I bring this up after the City of Bozeman decided to pass an ordinance regarding fireworks in town, and it seems that rubbed a whole lot of people wrong.

For the record, I'm all about celebrating with fireworks.  I grew up in the South and would mow lawns, wash cars, and do other odd jobs just so I could have fireworks money. I'm guessing I've lit off more fireworks over my lifetime than the average person, and have the burn marks to prove it.  But the arguing back and forth over this is completely entertaining, especially when you consider all of the facts.

The truth is, you can still buy fireworks, and you can still shoot off fireworks, just not in Bozeman, which seems like a reasonable thing, but not everyone agrees. Oh, and the reason for all of this?  Well, the noise and the fact that people simply didn't clean up after themselves. The City was tired of all the debris that was covering the town and before you say "We cleaned up our mess!" I'm sure you did, but a lot of people didn't.

However, the most ironic part of all of this is the folks that are screaming about "Our rights are being taken away" "I thought this was a free country" and "What are we Communist China?"

The answer to that question is, no we're not, but the fireworks you're buying came from there. 99.9 percent of all fireworks that you will buy this year came from China according to NPR.  Oh, and 70 percent of the fireworks that will be used in professional shows across the state came from China as well.

So, this 4th of July, just like in years past, we will be celebrating America's Independence by spending millions of dollars on products from a country that many of us consider "the enemy".

In fact, here in Montana, we're so concerned about the Chinese that our state government decided to ban the popular social media platform TikTok. And that my friends, is the amusing part to me, the hypocrisy of it all.

Don't get me wrong, we're all guilty of it.  We pick and choose what we support and don't support based on how it suits us.  We turn our heads or bend our standards based on how we'll be benefited. We scream about cancel culture and how wrong it is, then get mad and tell everyone to boycott a product or a company when we don't like something they do.

I suppose that's one of the perks of living in a free country, that we are free to say and do and spout off all kinds of things no matter how ridiculous they might be.  There are a lot of countries that can't, so think about that this 4th of July while you celebrate freedom...with communist fireworks.