Bring back April Fools Day!
I remember as a kid coming down to my sad breakfast of gruel and grits and our mom asking me and my brothers if we’d heard? “Heard what?” we’d ask groggily. “School was canceled today,” she’d say. “All right!” we’d yelled, visions of morning shows on TV and neighborhood ball games in the afternoon filling our dumb little heads. School’s out, school’s out, Teacher wore her ruler out! A surprise free holiday, oh boy!
And then at the height of our Cheerio euphoria, she’d drop the hammer. April Fool!!!! If there’s a special holiday for sadists to prey on the weak and the gullible, this is it. Cruelty as comedy. Our mother would laugh until she had to sit down, then when the Old Man stumbled to the table, she’d regale him with our sad stupidity and we were humiliated all over again. You know, before we had to go to our school that was still holding classes for boneheads like us.
By the next year we’d have forgotten what April first was — and so fell once more into our mother’s traps. She had plenty. I think she worked 364 days to get the next one ready. Nowadays, it’s April Fool 365 days, no days off. Viral e-mails, the internet, Fox and MSNBC, all 24/7. If you know what’s fact and what’s fiction, good work! Just don’t send me the news on my e-mail anymore. I’m not 6 years old and I don’t believe a word my mother says now, which are mostly pronouncements from Fox News.
We live in the Digital Age where ‘facts’ are cherry-picked by the unseen hand of a computer algorithm. If we believe everything we read now, it’s because we only read what we want to hear. What fun is it if we fool all of us who’ve fooled ourselves all of the time? This May 15th the FCC is going to shut down the internet for 24 hours for a much needed de-bugging for malware. I know we won’t, but maybe we could turn off the TV too for a little Cranial Cleaning. Maybe next year we’d have a chance to reinstall an authentic April Fools Day again. That, or add an app to our newly virus-scrubbed computer, a Prank Alert.