Blown Away - Literally

 There are two things that are certain in life: In summer, there will be news about children who died in cars because it was a hot day and they were forgotten by their parents, and in winter, there will be injuries from fireworks because people just can't learn a lesson.

This year, on the turn from 2020 to 2021, it was possibly going to be different. Because of the Corona / Covid pandemic, fireworks were either forbidden, restricted or the sale of fireworks was limited or outright forbidden.

This meant that a lot of people would not be using fireworks this year, either because it's too complicated to get things going or because they were going to stay home anyway.

But there were already experts predicting that the number of injuries would still be high. Because of the sales ban, many people might be attempting to use illegal or old unused fireworks. This would be dangerous. So people expected injuries, torn away limbs after all.

And man... new year's eve did not disappoint. Just this morning, I read about not only many injuries, including the good old torn off hand, but also two deaths. One of these deaths included a man who got his head "torn off" by fireworks. That's what I call "going out with a bang".

I know it is tragic, but in some way it is also morbidly amusing. The one year when you might expect things to be a little more quiet, people go out of their way to get killed. It takes a lot of skill to kill yourself with a self-made, unapproved pyro rocket. And even if you get killed, having your head blown off is an achievement of its own. On the other hand, I think the media picked up the story in a very grateful manner and really sensationalized it as much as possible.

So in some way it's funny how people just never want to learn from the dangers of fireworks. It seems that there always has to be that yearly tribute of torn off hands and burnt skin, almost like in the old days when people were made human sacrifices to pacify the gods.

I do understand that accidents can happen. But when you really follow the rules, only use safe fireworks, and apply caution, usually nothing too bad should happen.

So, I suppose we'll see how the summer season turns out. How many children will die in heated cars this year? In a number of years, we will hopefully have cars that can detect a child dying inside, so it will take precaution. But until then, lots of preventable stuff will happen.