Tragedy, defined

 I'm not a fireworks hater. Let's begin there today, two days after the biggest fireworks day of the year.

In a world that increasingly insists you must choose one camp or another on every issue, I sometimes insist on stubbornly pitching my tent on the unoccupied middle ground. That goes for this issue.

On the one hand, I don't depise fireworks with every fiber of my being, although I understand why some dog owners and combat veterans do. 

On the other, I think spending thousands of dollars to blow stuff up is a damn strange way to invest one's disposable income, and an even stranger celebration ritual. I don't hate the smell of explosives residue in the evening, to paraphrase Robert DuVall in "Apocalypse Now." But I don't love it, either.

And I especially don't love it when a Matiss Kivlenieks happens.

Kivlenieks was a 24-year-old goaltender for the Columbus Blue Jackets, until the Fourth of July. He died on that day because of fireworks. Someone setting off what was essentially a demilitarized mortar round accidentally fired one toward a group of people in Novi, Mich., and Kivlenieks apparently was struck by a piece of it.

That's not what killed him though, apparently. According to the autopsy, the  percussion from the blast itself likely had more to do with it.

Tragedy is a threadbare word these days, overused as it is. But a 24-year-old professional athlete dying what amounted to a combat death during a holiday celebration is pretty much the definition of it.

Such a completely avoidable and ridiculous way to go, if ridiculous is the appropriate term for such a horrific occurrence. And what an indictment of our national fetish for ordinance once reserved for military professionals, and now available to any goober off the street.

God bless America. But God also shake his head at our foolishness.