'Death hangs over the 4th of July'

 

     I only saw one float in the Northbrook 4th of July Parade this year.

     Oh, there were others. I think. I only saw the one.

    But I'm getting ahead of the story.

     I'd been fighting a virus all week. So my wife forbade me from attending the parade, even though it would pass around the corner from where we live. My offer to mask up did nothing. Why put people at risk? I'll go next year.
     Just before the parade began, however, I took Kitty on her walk, to avoid the crowds. We saw the public works truck blocking off Cedar Street — of course precautions have to be taken, after the massacre last year in Highland Park. It can happen literally anywhere, and just because it was a rifle before doesn't mean it won't be a speeding car this time. 

     Prudent, yet also wrong. I'd seen it before, at the Memorial Day Parade. It makes sense. But it also seems ... I don't know ... European. A precaution you'd see in Paris to guard against student rioters. Next we'll have gendarmes holding machine guns and manning water canons. More like living in prison than freedom.

    I hate missing parades, the school bands with their young musicians, the aged vets in their watch caps, the earnest local businesses and their antique cars.

    Though I did see one float, maybe even the most important. Just as Kitty and I prepared to cross Greenbriar, there came Lee and Nancy Goodman, pushing their homemade float. They must have been running late, as they hardly broke step as I called Fourth of July greetings to them. 

     You might remember Lee. He is the ghost in the machine of suburban conformity. "The spoon that stirs the pot," is how I think of him. In 2017, EGD noticed him scrawling anti-gun violence messages on his garbage cans. In 2020, he posted a running tally on the COVID death toll — then a mere 200,000 in the US — at the corner of Shermer and Walters, outraging a certain class of Northbrook residents who'd rather follow their president and not think about it. Huge Trump rallies were held at that same corner as a sort of reply. 

     The float he was pushing was one he prepared last year, but never used, when the Northbrook parade was cancelled after the Highland Park horror. "Guns ruin everything," Lee posted on his Facebook page, then, and this year his post was longer but no cheerier:

   "Death hangs over the 4th of July. There will be parades, fireworks, bands, and barbecues, but it won't be the same this year. All the streets that lead onto the parade route will be blocked by dump trucks, street sweepers, garbage trucks, and whatever other large objects can be found to limit access by lunatics...."

     Odd — or maybe not so odd — that we focused on the same thing. Okay, maybe not so odd. We both come from the same progressive liberal Jewish tradition that says we not only have a right, but a duty, to point a finger at what is going on. He resists in public. I do what I can here.  

     "God bless the Goodmans," I told a neighbor, who happened to be passing, as we watched them recede up Greenbriar, two small human figures vanishing in a wide tableau of North Shore plenty. We all have freedom in this country, and while most know enough to be grateful for it, few dare actually use the blessing we enjoy to anywhere near its fullest extent. For every American like Lee and Nancy Goodman who know that freedom means freedom to dissent, against the entire community if need be, there are a thousand others who think freedom means being free to squelch anyone who doesn't agree with you.