The Netherlands: When fireworks and alienated youth collide - by Barbara Kay

My son remembers playing with cap guns when he was young. You would put a roll of red paper with dots on it into the toy gun, and then every time you pulled the trigger, you’d hear a mighty bang and see and smell the residual smoke from it. Empowering! Especially when you exploded one behind some unsuspecting senior carrying bags of groceries and watched her scream, lose her balance and crash to the ground.

An American friend who lives in The Netherlands and owns several dogs recently wrote to me:

“We’ve come into the part of the year I hate the most here in the Netherlands: consumer fireworks time. Consumer fireworks legally go on sale three days before New Year’s Eve. As of yesterday, it sounds like a war zone here — everywhere little bombs going off, close and in the far distance. Occasionally you hear one of the huge ones that are smuggled in from Eastern Europe, as loud and as dangerous as hand grenades. Walking the dogs means keeping an eye out for gangs of kids (now on school holidays), so as not to pass close enough for them to throw a firecracker under any dog legs. Ditto walking or biking without dogs, since they also think it’s funny to throw firecrackers at humans.”

According to my friend, a poll taken by the Green Party in The Netherlands show that 60% of the population would like to see fireworks either banned outright or highly regulated and confined to organized events. But journalists who interviewed adolescents in the streets were told that a ban wouldn’t work, as they would make sure they found a way to get them anyway. (Gun control people: sound familiar?)

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