To the editor:

What a joy, earlier this summer, for my lady love and me to take our baby for his first concert, to hear the City Band at South Park. That night, during the band’s grand finale rendition of “Stars and Stripes,” that joy was juxtaposed to seething anger at the sonic battery by a National Guard-fired Howitzer. Fireworks go great with music. The Howitzer has a low, concussive blast that can damage even covered young ears.

In the grand scheme of things, I should expect this irresponsible stance towards the safety of children. Our so-called wars feature the “collateral” destruction of young lives in many ways. From Pakistani wedding parties transformed by remote hellfire into terrorism for the lucky children to remember, to Howitzer-fired, depleted uranium munitions toxifying the genetic environment for Iraqi generations and the future offspring of exposed U.S. soldiers, our “foreign policy” has a habit of mass child abuse.

Maybe next year the children of Lawrence will be treated, like the children of Gaza, to a Howitzer-fired white phosphorous show to go along with a non-emphasis on universal, inherent rights. If, by the subsequent year, we still haven’t figured out our patriotic moral duties, we should display some honest self-consciousness by taking the Stars and Stripes themselves, waved by local children, and fire live Howitzers at them. Then we could put on display habitual domains in which we seem to casually dwell — holier and holier symbols we use to justify blowing things and people up in the presence of children.