Growing up in New York City in the 1960s, I used to look forward to the Fourth of July in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. We lived in Queens, not far from Shea Stadium and my beloved New York Mets, but we always spent “The Fourth” with my cousins and grandparents in Brooklyn. Things were different back then. Nobody drove to a local park or beach to watch fireworks. The holiday was a participatory event.

My uncle worked in “The City”, the place that everyone in the rest of the world called Manhattan, so he would pick up our arsenal in June from Chinatown, which is where everyone got their fireworks. He paid cash, and my dad would split the cost with him later. My father and uncle loved the Fourth of July almost as much as I did. Before sundown, I would be allowed to shoot off some of the small stuff, usually individual “mat” firecrackers and a few bottle rockets. Later, my uncle would drag a giant old metal milk bucket filled with sand into the street. that's when the real fun started. Family lore has it that my father had me hold a lit roman candle in the middle of the street when I was two or three years old. I have no memory of the event, but apparently my mother was furious at him, fearing that I would get hurt. I didn’t. As a matter of fact, no one I knew ever got hurt. We’d hear rumors and see articles in the newspapers every year, but I never met anyone who lost an eye or a finger.

Why did we have to get the fireworks from Chinatown? I don’t know. Back then, different ethnic groups controlled different parts of the economy in the city. The Chinese had the fireworks, Koreans controlled flower shops, the Jews sold bagels and knishes, and Italians like us had the pizza market cornered. The one thing all these groups had in common was the dollar, “the long green.” Checks and credit cards were rare back then, and were used only to pay the rent, mortgage and utilities. There would be stories about how the New York underground economy was costing the city millions of dollars a year. Nobody cared. Everyone just paid their bills and fed their kids.

I guess I should point out that fireworks were illegal in New York City back then. I didn’t even know they were illegal until I was a teenager. The sound of explosions that could be heard every Fourth of July in Bensonhurst could make you think World War 3 had started, yet I never remember seeing a cop. Old ladies would pull out folding chairs or sit on the “stoop” to enjoy the show. No one was inside. Sure, there was the occasional squabble when an errant bottle rocket would take out a neighbor’s flowerpot, but no one would even think of calling the police. It was one big party. The cops lived in the neighborhood too, and they were probably igniting their own stash.

There was a different feel back then. I’m not saying that everyone loved the police, but your average citizen didn’t fear that the SWAT team might show up. This was before police departments were militarized with overpriced weaponry sold to the Defense Department by Raytheon. This was back when constitutional protections still meant something. This was before Nixon cut the last remaining ties to a gold conversion in 1971, unleashing a fiat tidal wave. No, things were not perfect back then, and maybe I’m just an old man longing for days gone by, but sometimes I feel like I don’t recognize the country where I was born.

When I was a kid, whenever you got into an argument with one of your friends over something, the discussion would always end with the refrain “It’s a free country. I can do what I want.”

I doubt anyone says that anymore.