Guy Fawkes is held every year in New Zealand on November 5. Photo / Supplied
THREE KEY FACTS:
Dave Mollard is a Palmerston North community worker and social commentator
OPINION
I am blessed to be Generation X, the cohort born between 1966 and 1979.
We were the first generation where, in most families, both parents worked, giving us wonderful independence but also responsibility. Mum wasn’t home to prepare dinner so we had to do it, but we also had the freedom to prepare spaghetti on toast three nights a week.
It was pre-internet so we lived relatively anonymous lives; when we did stupid things it was only our mates that saw it, our bullies could not shame us online, they needed to do so via scratching obscenities about us on our school desks, a task that took 15 minutes with a nice sharp compass.
We dubbed our music to cassettes before jumping on our BMXs and riding down to the river for a swim.
We all looked forward to the weeks before Guy Fawkes when we could spend our pocket money at Sue’s Dairy on all manner of fireworks. Tom Thumbs, Double Happys, Poha and moon rockets were the choice of our friends.
The Vietnam war, then the Afghan war and finally the Falklands war were on TV so we replicated the deadly scenes we saw every night by combining Poha and lemons into grenades and Moontravellers and a pipe into bazookas.
None of us got seriously hurt, but we always heard the stories of the kid in the next town who lost an eye due to a wayward Catherine wheel and we didn’t see our cat for a week.
At Riverdale School, each class made a “Guy”, a manikin made out of pantyhose, old shirts and trousers filled with straw. Then we got to place it on the unlit bonfire and patiently waited for dusk so the head of the PTA could set the bonfire alight and burn the five or six effigies to the ground.
We didn’t understand who or what Guy Fawkes was other than a good excuse to blow stuff up.
We are a different society now. We don’t leave our kids at home, not many of our kids ride bikes and we definitely do not burn effigies.
When you think about it, it’s weird that we ever commemorated Guy Fawkes. Depending on which version of the Lord’s Prayer you prayed, Fawkes was either a failed terrorist or a failed freedom fighter.
Either way, he had very little to do with our shaky isles.
We now know fireworks are dangerous, expensive, bad for our pets and not great for the environment, and are nominally used to celebrate a parliament on the other side of the world not blowing up.
So why do we still do it? Maybe because deep down inside the caveman in many of us males, there is a primeval urge to blow stuff up.
On average, 18 people die every year in recreational craft incidents in New Zealand.