Jeff Whitten, Local Columnist

For anyone remotely interested, let it be known I intend to stay home and out of the way this July 4 weekend. This is because I hate traffic and don’t like crowds, and there’s way too much of both these days in Georgia’s Coastal Empire and the South Carolina Lowcountry.

Besides, with me out of the way, that’s one less funny-looking, overaged teenager who thinks 60 is the new 20 out there for our vastly underappreciated and underpaid first responders to have to worry about.

And while I’m thinking about it, remember a lot of folks have to work holidays like July 4 so we can have a reasonably safe and enjoyable time, and the more of us there are around here the more people it takes to keep us from creating havoc all over the place but especially at boat ramps. Apparently, putting boats in the water is not a natural skill.

Alas, as a buddy of mine noted lately about what’s transpiring hereabouts, the adage “more people, more problems,” seems apt. So please be nice to the men and women out there having to ride herd over this weekend and the ever expanding populace down here to party down and enjoy them some freedom.

Besides, I ran amok with the best of the idiots and probably outdid a few back in the day. Especially when I was in the Army but also while finishing my education at Georgia Southern. And, like now, we didn’t even need a holiday to let loose and make nuisances of ourselves.

However, it was on a July 4 weekend that I almost blew my lip off – well, it wasn’t blown entirely off, but it could have been – while throwing bottle rockets at my sergeant buddy, who was throwing them at me.

This occurred in Richmond Hill circa 1985 or 1986 or maybe 1987. I had come down from Fort Bragg, N.C., and the 5th Battalion, 8th Field Artillery barracks, where I was stationed at the time. I was dating a girl who lived in what was then merely a nice bump in the road on Highway 17 between Midway and Keller Flea Market, which had just opened.

There wasn’t even a stoplight at 17 and 144 back then, just a flashing yellow light. And it was enough to handle the traffic.

Anyhow. Part of that weekend’s festivities (we wound up at St. Simon’s Island later) included a cookout at her parent’s home, with beer involved. And it it seems only yesterday that at some point my sergeant buddy and I decided to make use of the supply of bottle rockets we’d grabbed on the way down during a stop in my home state of South Carolina – back then it wasn’t easy to get firecrackers in Georgia, or beer on Sunday, for that matter – by throwing them at one another to see what would happen.

Lit, of course. The exciting part of the contest, or whatever it was, is that once you sit down a beer to light and throw a bottle rocket, you really have no idea which direction the thing will go.

And with Whitten’s Rule of Unintended Consequences being in force then as it is now, at some point I got hit by an incoming bottle rocket.

In fact, I can still see the bottle rocket in my mind’s eye, this little pencil-shaped missile trailing sparks, maybe because I’m the idiot who threw it, watched as it went end over end, then reversed course and made a beeline at me.

It got me smack in the lip. I saw a light and some fireworks and smelled gunpowder and sat down hard. There was blood and goo and someone said, “I think he blew his lip off,” and “does anybody see a lip,” and maybe a search for the detached lip and some talk about combat lifesaving ensued before we got the blood cleared away and realized the lip was still attached to its owner, me.

And then, after things calmed down and the bleeding stopped and people told me I could’ve shot my eye out, there was a great big gnarly wound right under my nose.

For a couple hours or so I had to wear a Band-Aid until I got tired of it getting wet from beer and got rid of it. I was left to go through the rest of the July 4 weekend with this giant horrible looking scab right under my nose that from a distance kind of looked like either Hitler’s moustache or the world’s largest booger. That is not a good look at the beach, or wasn’t then anyhow, but to my girlfriend at the time’s credit she did not disown me and I wasn’t left to fend for myself.

Also, for point of reference, this was about the time Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” album was huge and it got played a lot as we piled in a Ford F150 and rode on down I-95 to St. Simon’s – me and my sergeant buddy kicking back in lawnchairs in the bed of the pickup guzzling beer and waving at yankees, because you could get away with stuff like that back then. I wouldn’t try it now. I would recommend Springsteen’s album. It’s excellent and holds up well, as does most of his work.

Anyhow, I survived and am older now, and arguably wiser, but probably less free spirited and that’s ok, I’ve had a good run.

Younger generations, meanwhile, might find things tough down the road but I’m hopeful they’re made of better, kinder, more peaceable stuff than we are.

In the meantime, I realize I’m very fortunate in many ways. I am not being chased by masked ICE agents because I look like I might’ve come here illegally or being investigated for having contrary opinions to those in vogue amongst the red hat crowd.

I’m also in fairly good health and am blessed to have been born in the USA – which for all its faults, and those are caused by people, really, because that’s what a nation is, people – is still the best country in the world and a place which people die trying to get into. It’s also the best place on earth in which not only to act a fool, but, as we tend to find out every two years, send them to Congress.

Long live the ideals for which our founding fathers risked everything, though for a time they believed that some men were created more equal than others. And may we as a nation find some humility and kick the hubris to the curb, before we lose the freedom we give so much lip service to. No pun intended.

Postscript: One of the best columns I ever read about the Fourth of July was written sometime in the 1970s by the late Erma Bombeck. I will tack a popular quote from it here, as a reminder of who we used to be.

“You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.”

Now retired, Whitten is an occasional columnist for the News.