As I write this on July 5, fires rage across the country and people find themselves without homes. Hundreds of thousands of young children and their parents have endured a month of sleepless nights, and millions of pets and wildlife creatures have spent the last month tortured by explosions. All because of America’s love of do-it-yourself fireworks. It’s a beautiful Sunday afternoon in most of America, so quiet picnics and babies’ naps will be interrupted by Harley riders revving their engines on Main Streets everywhere. And it’s a day that ends in “Y” so at least a few children will lose their lives to stray or accidental bullets. America is not without its share of problems, but many of them stem from one simple fact:
Vroom and boom are leading us to our doom.
Here’s what I mean: a great many of our problems all stem from the combined facts that:
- Grownups should quickly age out of an unhealthy love for things that go “vroom” and “boom.”
- In concert with that, as we age we should develop more and more consideration for others and restrict our activities accordingly.
- But the United States is plagued by arrested development in both phases.
Let’s dig in.
Section 1: Stunted Psychological Development And Things That Go Vroom & Boom
Much like Freud has his stages of psychosexual development and acknowledges that some people can’t seem to move out of stages (e.g. an anal-retentive personality), there’s another stage that we should all grow out of but many don’t: the Vroom & Boom stage.
At some point in our adolescence through our 20s, it’s perfectly normal to love things that go vroom and boom – whether literally (fireworks and explosions, motorcycles) or figuratively (loud, angry music; look-at-me clothing; crowded places with neon lights). We’re announcing our arrival in the world – look at me! listen to my music! – and expressing our independence having spent our lives with our decisions being made for us by parents and teachers.
The Vroom & Boom stage comes with aggressive music played as loudly as possible – a teenager wouldn’t dream of pulling out of a driveway or parking spot without the volume turned up to 11. It features bars where you can’t hear someone talk without shouting, it’s big trucks or fast cars or motorcycles and at least a few gear shifts between stoplights even if they’re less than 200 yards apart. It’s driving a few hours to get south of a state border to buy the fireworks or grain alcohol that your state deems too dangerous for human use. Whether beach or ski slope or hiking trail, it’s made better by a bluetooth speaker and as many cheap beers as you can carry.
But by a certain age – generally late 20s into early 30s – we should see our love of Vrooms and Booms decline. We’re seeking peace in our lives: the book is now better than the movie and you enjoy early mornings more than late nights. Beaches, ski slopes, and hiking trails are where you seek solitude – they don’t need a live-action soundtrack. You’d vastly prefer a reliable sedan in a muted color to a sporty car or truck with flames on the side, and sometimes you turn off the radio just to drive in silence and explore your thoughts. You lean toward sailboats versus power boats; a quiet restaurant in the Village versus a Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square; a pedal bike versus a motorcycle.
Simply put: if you’re 17 you’re perfectly justified in spending all summer trying to get on a jet-ski. If you’re 40 and that’s your summer, you’re a total caricature, like Eastbound & Down’s Kenny Effing Powers.
We all instinctively know this. When a man in his 40s buys a sports car or gets a tattoo, we call it a midlife crisis and look at him with equal parts scorn and pity. And if he shows up at a go-kart track without his kids or at a Spring Break bar, well, in any capacity, we look at him even more skeptically. Vroom & Boom pursuits are a young person’s game.
Which doesn’t mean we all have to listen only to acoustic sets and watch only documentaries in our 30s on our way to becoming literature professors at Bryn Mawr by our 50s to have lived an age-appropriate life. But over time, we should naturally wean off of our love of things that go vroom and boom. That graph doesn’t have to hit zero – there’s always room to relive your teenage and college passions or to enjoy flashing lights and loud booms with your kids – but unless your psychological development has been arrested in the Vroom & Boom zone, it should have a noticeably negative slope.
Section 2: Consideration For Others
Here’s the big thing about adulthood and maturity. Your Vroom & Boom slope may be steeper or relatively flat – no matter how strange I might find you, you’re not an inherently maladjusted adult just because you really like the sound of a Harley-Davidson sputtering as you give it gas in neutral, or because you love the powerful feeling of pulling the trigger of a gun. We all, to varying degrees, have some kind of vroom and boom we enjoy – songs from college we crank up in the car while we’re alone, for example. But take heed of that phrase “while we’re alone.” Because while your Vroom and Boom line shouldn’t define you as a person, the way it combines with another, crucial trendline, is massively important.
As we age, we should see a steep increase in the amount of respect and consideration we give to others.
A 50-year old who still gets childlike enjoyment from watching Independence Day fireworks might come off a little weird but he’s totally harmless. But a 50-year old who spends most evenings in June lighting off fireworks – particularly in a neighborhood or in a dry area – is just a jerk. Why? Because those fireworks have negative effects on many others. Their pets or toddlers may be tortured by the sound; the debris may litter their yard or potentially catch fire on their roof, or light up a hillside and force evacuations and home losses. An adult absolutely should take those things into consideration, and the only possible conclusion a reasonable adult can draw would be “the tiny amount of enjoyment I will get from lighting a small fire and watching this object go boom is not at all worth the significant inconvenience that I will force on dozens/hundreds of my neighbors, and then once you factor in the measurable risk of injury or property damage it’s insane that I’m even considering this.”
But, of course, across America the last month tens of thousands of fully grown men and women have decided otherwise, that their personal enjoyment of a phase they really should have long grown out of outweighs the concerns of their neighbors. And therein lies a massive national problem. Our national graph should look like this:
Where parental involvement halves the amount of damage done by that triangle at the left (my hormone-addled desire to go boom outweighs the amount that I care how it affects others), and self-restraint keeps adults in the triangle on the right.
What should happen is that:
-Vroom-boomers who love motorcycles generally avoid quiet neighborhoods and Main Streets, taking care to quiet their engines as much as possible until they’re on the long, open road where they can enjoy the vroom without waking babies, setting off car alarms, and in general annoying everyone but themselves and the thrice-divorced career temp riding on their back.
-Hunters live in sheer terror that their guns will fall into the hands of precocious children, so they minimize and securely lock up the firearms they own – or refuse to store them in a home where children live or visit and instead simply rent them on their occasional wilderness hunting trips far from civilization.
-The idle rich address their boredom with philanthropy or travel or really anything other than going to exotic locations to kill elephants, lions, and giraffes, knowing that the preservation of these magical animals is paramount to the pride of their local countrymen and allows for future generations to enjoy the splendor of the natural world.
-And much, much more! We should all be governed by a healthy amount of fear that a trivial amount of enjoyment for ourselves could come at the expense of significantly more discomfort or danger for someone else. While seated the able-bodied among us should constantly be scanning our train car or the seating at our airport gate looking for the elderly or pregnant who might need a seat; while parking, we should take the spots further from the store to ensure that the prime spots are available for parents escorting young children or for older shoppers pushing heavy carts. We should take Lyft or Uber any time we’re planing to have a few drinks, we should watch our language when children are nearby, we should speak in library voices on airplanes – we should approach communal situations with an understanding that if everyone treats each other how we’d like to be treated, then it’s a positive experience for everyone.
But if American Exceptionalism is really a thing, it’s this: we are exceptional at loving things that go Vroom and Boom, and we’re exceptional at prioritizing the most marginal of happiness or convenience for ourselves at the expense of the safety or well-being of others.
Enjoy hunting? Not my cup of tea, man – I think you can enjoy the outdoors by hiking or cross-country skiing or a whole lot of things. But do you in a way that’s safe. But of course that’s not enough: gun enthusiasts have to open-carry strut around capitol buildings and town squares and fast food restaurants frightening and intimidating real people because “I like boom so you’d better deal with it.”
Enjoy motorcycling? Who doesn’t love the wind in our hair and the feeling of two-wheeling down an open road (you know there’s a motorless type that can help with fitness, too, but you do you) – but when you roar your engine while stopped at a traffic light in front of an outdoor cafe, it’s less about feeling free and more about just being a dick (or whatever South Park may brilliantly deem you).
Enjoy fireworks? Roll out a beach blanket and enjoy the show on the Fourth! But if your plan is to, as The Simpsons said, “celebrate America by blowing up a small part of it,” you’re putting “Me, The Boomlover” way ahead of “We The People” – that’s not patriotism, that’s selfish pyromania.
Section 3: Vroom and Boom is causing our doom.
Now you might be thinking that loud noises aren’t necessarily doom, so where does the title come from? Think of some of the biggest problems America is dealing with in 2020:
COVID-19 (we lead the world!)
Gun violence (we lead the world!)
Police Brutality (if we don’t lead, we’re close)
Intense political polarization
They all directly related to our culture of Vroom-and-Boom.
Gun violence really just comes down to the fact that the U.S. has long prioritized things that go boom over public safety. No other country in the world deals with anywhere near this kind of gun epidemic, but the NRA and the Republican party side with the boom over the logical. No matter the severity of the massacre, the innocence of the victims (Sandy Hook proved it: if kindergartners being mowed down by a madman didn’t lead to change, what will?), or the massive running total of the death count, the steadfast cry from the right is to never compromise, always prioritize the thing that goes boom.
Police brutality is similar – we so love things that go boom that we’ve militarized our police forces with tanks, riot gear, military-grade weapons, and an us-vs.-them mentality. And of course the police recruit largely from a pool of “people who like things that go vroom and boom” – people who want to carry guns for a living, flip the lights on and drive as fast as they want. The general sentiment in media is that the desk job of policing is for losers – the real badasses are breaking the rules on the street. We created a “war on drugs” so that there would always be bad guys to go after – rather than address the demand for drugs with counseling and medical care, we labeled it a “war” and turned thousands of wannabe Rambos into drug warriors who solve problems by making them go boom.
As for political polarization and COVID-19 – Donald Trump is the ultimate noisemaker for people who like stuff that goes vroom and boom. Like a firework or an idling motorcycle engine, he loudly blows off hot gases with no real purpose other than to delight those who like loud, obnoxious sounds. So when he spouts off that a dangerous disease is a hoax or that masks are for the weak, the Vroom-and-Boom crowd rejoices – they get to yell and scream against masks and distancing, and now we’re the only modern country that hasn’t gotten COVID under control. And because the Vroomer-Boomers relish in the small pleasures that come at the inconvenience of others, we’ve arrived at a political chasm where compromise or even seeing eye-to-eye is impossible: like a motorcyclist revving it up next to picnickers or a gun nut open-carrying an AR-15 into Quiznos, a great many Trump supporters have no agenda other than “let’s piss some people off.” Because of course that’s the Vroom-and-Boom way.
So this weekend, as some nurse fireworks injuries and many celebrate American Independence, take note of the true meaning of American Exceptionalism. We’re #1 in gun deaths, #1 in Coronavirus deaths, and #1 in per-capita air pollution. All because, no matter who it hurts, we love things that go Vroom and Boom.
See Me Squeegee 