APRIL: THE MONTH OF BUNNIES, WAR AND DEATH
I used to associate April with springtime, cherry blossoms, and pastel colors. April brings us Easter, the Holy Week of Ramadan, and Passover.* It’s a time of resurrection and renewal. It‘s a time to emerge from the snow and cold of winter to see our neighbors again, to watch the marigolds bloom. The warmer weather of spring, with the plowing and planting of fields, heralds a seasonal return to life.
But April is also a month of war and death, often clustering around April 19th.
April 19, 1775 - The shot heard round the world at Lexington and Concord, starting the American Revolution.
April 12, 1861- The Civil War began with the firing on Ft. Sumter. It ended on April 9, 1865
April 14, 1865 - Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.
April 18, 1906 - The San Francisco earthquake and fire took place in the early morning.
April 14, 1914 – Sinking of the Titanic.
April 19, 1943 – Start of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, when imprisoned Jews rose up against the Nazis.
April 18, 1983 - Sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans, were killed by a suicide bomber at the US embassy in Beirut.
April 19,1993 - In a shootout with federal authorities in Waco Texas, 76 men, women and children, including cult leader David Koresh, were killed.
April 19, 1995 - Terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City killed 168 innocent people.
April 20th 1999 - Two high school students, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, shot and killed fifteen people at Columbine High School in Denver.
April 16, 2007 - At Virginia Tech University, a student shot thirty-three people to death, including himself, and injured twenty-three.
April 20, 2010 - The Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven people.
April 17, 2013, an ammonium nitrate explosion occurred at a fertilizer storage facility in West, Texas; fifteen people were killed, more than 160 were injured, and more than 150 buildings were damaged or destroyed.
April 15, 2015, the Boston Marathon bombing killed three and wounded 260. On April 19th one suspect was captured and the other was killed in a shootout.
April 16, 2019, A fire destroyed the eight-hundred-year-old Cathedral at Notre Dame.
April 20, 2019, a coordinated attack by the Islamic State on Easter Sunday, killed around 250 people in Siri Lanka.
April 20th known as 4/20, has become an annual celebration of smoking Marijuana.
So why April?
Because it’s spring. Becaause the warmer weather of late April is a great time to start a war. The American Revolution and Civil War started and ended in April. World Wars I and II I started in summer.
Perhaps the best example of wars starting in the spring was the First Crusade in 1096. The year before, in November, Pope Urban II, called for a Crusade to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims. During the winter, tens of thousands of churlish, illiterate peasants sat in the smoky hovels they shared with animals, contemplating the glory that awaited them. The official start date of the Crusade was August 15, 1096, but in March, a gaggle of around 40,000 European serfs, low-level knights, scythe men, prostitutes and children, unable to contain themselves and anxious for their only opportunity for of glory, adventure and resurrection from misery, marched eastward where they all died. The Byzantine emperor’s daughter, Anna Comnena, observed, “a mountain of bones, notable for its breadth and depth.”
The warmer weather of spring also brings out the crazies. Losers like Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh, maladjusted young men like Klebold and Harris, and the Boston Marathon bombers, probably spent the winter ruminating on the people who have wronged them or dissed them or intimidated them. The coming of spring gave them a new sense of hope that they could wreak vengeance on a world that has not given them what they wanted out of life.
Tim McVeigh specifically chose April 19th for his vengeance against the Federal government which he blamed for the Waco attack exactly two years earlier. In early spring, like the peasant crusaders a thousand years ago, the disaffected crawl out of their psychological hovels to make one last bid for glory or revenge or immortality.
Oh, and by the way, the devil himself, Adolf Hitler, was born on April 20, 1889; he took his life on April 30, 1945
Author’s note - Events like earthquakes, tidal waves and fires, have nothing to do with the seasons, but everything to do with “Acts of God,” as insurance companies define the term. The earthquake that rumbled New York City a few days ago, and an earthquake that destroyed the city of Lisbon in 1755, will be the subject of the next post.
*Correction: I forgot to mention a fourth big religion celebrated in the spring: Transgender Day of Visibility, which supplanted Easter Sunday, a day celebrating the central event in all of Christianity. I suspect that unless you lived in a distant galaxy, long ago and far away, the visibility of transgenders was never an issue.
While we’re dwelling on sinister, nasty and abhorrent April events, let’s not forget…April 15th. Enjoyed your article!
Oh, man! way to wreck April for me. April has been my favoirite month of the year since I was in high school. In fact, one year when I was in college , I declared April 21 to be my favorite day of the year . It doesn't always happen to be ike this but I think of that date as the quintessential April weather day - blue sky with puffy white clouds, lots of blossoms around, a slight breeze - so fresh and so hopeful. Yes, I knew some of those dates above. Of course I remember the shock but to see them all piled together was tough. BUT, I am not going to let go of my delight in April. I am just going to have to be sure that I put a ton of kindness out to balance out all the blood.