Three cheers!
Once again, the St. Joseph Lions Fourth of July Parish Weekend Festival did the city proud. It was a fun-filled success that celebrated this city’s human bonds, its innovations, its mutually beneficial partnerships, its welcoming friendliness and its healthy cross-communications among city government, the local colleges and the whole central Minnesota area – and beyond.
Bravo!
So many people of all ages attended the entertaining July 3 Joetown Rocks concert and the grand parade the next day.
The thousands of people who attended those celebrations obviously cherish their cities and, not to forget, their country and their precious American freedoms, which are now so under threat. Such Fourth of July celebrations are annual personal and collective renewals of our dedication to American Representative Democracy.
In the St. Joseph parade’s units, there were so many reminders of what makes St. Joseph and our neighboring areas so interconnected and successful: gutsy risk-taking, unique new businesses, community outreach, excellent partnerships, city-council initiatives and more.
The Fourth of July Festival was an expression of all of the above. It was inspiring, uplifting, entertaining. Well (oops!) except for the “Wild West” shoot-out parade unit that involved a dozen or more people gussied up as “Old West varmint gunslingers” shooting each other like gangbusters.
The “Wild West” participants strode down the street shooting one another with hand-held pistols that emitted plumes of smoke and fire in ear-splitting noises that caused many parade spectators to flinch and cringe. Some adults and children along the parade route looked alarmed, as if some actual mass shooting was happening down the street somewhere.
Those “Wild West” participants are no doubt good people who work very hard to deliver a good parade performance. And their shoot-out could be justified as a re-enactment of violent chapters of American history – violence that includes slavery, the Civil War, the lawless West and on and on. One could even argue the “Wild West” shoot-out should be part of a parade because – make no mistake – violence was and still is very much a part of our history.
At the St. Joseph parade, a woman went scurrying into the street to quickly pick up tossed candy to give to her little boy. She returned with a few pieces of candy that she tossed into her little son’s stash bag and then held two of her fingers around a metallic object – a spent shell cartridge from one of the “fake” bullets. She gave a look that evoked a worried-but-thankful thought that “Thank goodness it’s fake.”
That “shoot-out” at the parade was to many people disturbing. With all the mass shootings and other acts of vicious violence these days, the last thing we (especially children) need is to witness murderous mayhem as some kind of parade “entertainment.” It’s not.
Children especially, not to mention we adults, should not be soaking up the message, in a happy parade of all places, that violence is a solution to anything.
This may be an over-reaction, but maybe we should keep reminders of violence out of our Fourth of July parades, which are supposed to be celebratory, happy, optimistic.
Down with violence old or new. Up with a peaceful America!
