If you were among the many who dared spend their Fourth of July evening watching fireworks at Chula Vista’s Elite Athlete Training Center, congratulations! Presumably, by now, you’ve survived the traffic and you made it home just in time for the new weekend to begin.
You were also part of an elite group of sorts. Those who watched a live fireworks show in Chula Vista since 2019.
The ongoing pandemic had put a freeze on public pyrotechnic shows. This year’s event marked the return to the exploding bright lights and big booms in the sky.
Though it occurs to me had the city and sponsors wanted to save money on a fireworks show they could have hosted a night of “debates” between Chula Vista councilman John McCann and former Sweetwater Union High School District candidate Kevin O’Neill, who in 2014 famously had a brief exchange in which councilman and now mayoral candidate McCann allegedly threw a rock at O’Neill’s vehicle; Chula Vista councilwoman and former mayoral candidate Jill Galvez and one-time aide Robert Moreno, who she unceremoniously and surprisingly dumped after six months on the job in 2019 because she ostensibly wanted his salary savings to go toward public safety items—even though they could not be allotted to such efforts— and he later actively and publicly worked against her bid to become Chula Vista’s mayor in the recent June election; pandemic mask advocates versus anti-mask zealots; vaccine deniers versus vaccine supporters; casual Second Amendment scholars/gun rights proponents versus anti-mass shooting enthusiasts; anti-abortion champions against women and human rights defenders; and “lamestream” media critics and conspiracy theorists versus journalists and fact checkers.
Admittedly the encounters would not have been as bright but surely they would have been colorful and insightful, especially during this election year.
Maybe next time.
For now we’ll have to be satisfied and happy that the big, bright communal pyrotechnic celebration feting the United States came back to Chula Vista—and that no one was injured or killed on July 4 by a white supremacist as they were in Highland Park, Illinois.
America. The beautiful.
