AS 1998 ticked away, we watched Palolo Valley fill with smoke from a friend's hillside lanai. A mere haze at 9 p.m., the cloud thickened until by midnight, looking like an enormous blanket of fluffy gray dryer lint, it blacked out every light more than a block away. There must be
a better wayOver the rain-soaked roofs, above this pall, outlaw rockets burst one after another. Beneath it, strings of hundreds of thousands of firecrackers sparked, rattled and thundered in a continuous roar. The sounds and sights brought to mind television pictures of Iraqi anti-aircraft firing into the Baghdad skies. Some say the ban on aerials was unenforceable, but it seemed to be merely unenforced.
As the calendar rolled over, the drizzle lifted and moonlight silhouetted the oddly cone-shaped ridge rising above the cloud. We drank a glass of champagne to the old year and thought ahead 365 days. If 1999 rates this tonnage of exploding gunpowder, what will the millennium offer?
Even as I write this, in the distance I hear the rattling pop of leftover firecrackers. It's a joyous sound. As with champagne and other good things, however, moderation is key.
To linear thinkers, if a million firecrackers are fun, a billion are a thousand times better -- but that's untrue. On a dry New Year's, they start fires; on a calm, damp one the smoke chokes and blinds, as it did this year. We've overdone it and now we've got to outgrow it.
John Flanagan is editor and publisher of the Star-Bulletin.
To reach him call 525-8612, fax to 523-8509, send
e-mail to publisher@starbulletin.com or write to
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, Hawaii 96802.