EDITORIAL: The big bang is ingrained in our universe

Louis Pierard
Prime Minister Helen Clark wants to ban Guy Fawkes if folk behave badly tonight.
Perhaps with the same immoderation shown by the pyromaniacs who prompted her threat, Miss Clark likened her home suburb of Mt Albert to downtown Kandahar in Afghanistan. Nevertheless one appreciates takes her point.
The annual event is an inherited tradition which celebrates less the "delivery of Parliament" from the hands of a group of terrorists than the foiling of an attempt by a Catholic cell to wipe out England's Protestant King and aristocracy.
To most antipodeans, it is nothing more than a pretext for making dangerous, colourful and expensive noise. Without fireworks and the excited anticipation that accompanies them, the gunpowder plot would long ago have been consigned to the reliquary of history. So why "celebrate" Guy Fawkes at all?
There is, in most of us, an appetite (usually cured by adulthood and despair at the exasperating recklessness of others) for being dangerously entertained. That is why backyard fireworks have endured, despite the flowering of officially promoted public displays with their vastly superior pyrotechnics.
They took away crackers because people did silly things with them, scaring animals and injuring themselves. Then they confiscated skyrockets because of their potential for making work for the Fire Service. And they shortened the fireworks selling season to try to limit the fallout.
But the enthusiasm of the home fireworkers has remained undimmed. However much the opportunity to char ourselves and others is limited, the do-it-yourself fireworks session trumps all for the added spice of invention, resourcefulness and peril.
What has changed in the past 50 years? Nothing. Those who fondly recall the days Guy Fawkes was idiot-free are deluding themselves. The pursuit of hazardous fun was no more restrained than it is today and there was no shortage of scar tissue to prove it . Today more are doing it in more confined spaces and with much less tolerance by others to property damage, public nuisance, terrorising animals and to danger.
Fireworks are anathema in a risk-averse age. Yet the hunger for overreaching ourselves at the risk of being (figuratively) burnt should not be underestimated.
Recognising that irrational urge might also help explain the unabated, terrifying stupidity tobe seen on the roads. Can the nasty passion for danger be snuffed out by statute or sublimated by extreme sports (or hair shirts)? While prohibition inevitably risks lending hazardous activity an extra fillip, the hours youngsters spend in front of computers in pursuit of virtual experience no doubt make the real risks of fireworks at home more attractive than ever.