Ruination Day

I don't care for the month of April, and not because of taxes (which provide funding for infastructrure!) or the weather (which brings May flowers!) or T.S. Eliot (he wrote "The Wasteland"!)

• April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis.
• April 12, 1861: The Confederate army bombards Fort Sumter, effectively beginning the Civil War.
• April 14, 1865: Writer, emancipator, and re-unifier Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth in Ford's Theatre.
• April 14, 1912: The Titanic sunk.
• April 14, 1935: Twenty dust storms swept through the plains on a day known as "Black Sunday." In the following days, dust darkened the skies as far east as New York and Boston.
• April 16, 2007: Seung-hui Cho rampaged at Virginia Tech, killing 33 students and teachers, wounding 29, the country's worst school shooting.
• April 18, 1775: The Redcoats landed, and Paul Revere rode, effectively beginning the Revolutionary War.
• April 18, 1906: The San Francisco earthquake killed an estimated 3,000 and destroyed 80% of the city.
• April 19, 1993: The FBI/ATF siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, TX, ended with 79 dead, including 21 children.
• April 19, 1995: Timothy McVeigh car-bombed the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, OK. The blast and collapse killed 168 people, including 19 children, and injured 800 more.
• April 20th, 1999: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 Columbine High School students and one teacher before turning their guns on themselves in the U.S.'s most notorious high school shooting prior to Virginia Tech.
• April 29, 1992: The L.A. riots broke out following the verdict in the Rodney King case. Of the more than 50 people killed over the next six days, about half were African-American.

Bad things happen in April. People do stupid and inhumane things.

In his books on writing, John Gardner put forth the idea that one should always strive to be life-affirming in what one writes, on the basis that within the audience for any particular piece of writing there may be a person who is quite seriously considering suicide. With that as a possibility, Gardner suggested that the only moral requirement of writing is that it nudge -- to the extent it can -- towards tomorrow and possibility and humanity.

Every now and then I like to take out that idea of Gardner's and walk it around a little. It makes the world seem brighter, particulary on a sunny Spring day by the lake...