There are many wonderful things about the month of April.
It traditionally signifies the birth of spring. There are April showers which bring May flowers.
Springtime events are going on constantly, from yard sales to barbecues, and the spring sports are in full swing: baseball, softball, track and field, and more.
And yet, I always fear the third and fourth weeks of April because of all the strange, and sometimes terrible, things that have happened on these days.
On the third week of April, 1983, the United States Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, was bombed by terrorists. 63 people died in the attack.
It seemed like good news in 1989 when 100,000 young people protested in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The iconic photo of a student standing up to a tank doesn’t show the gruesome Communist crackdown to come.
David Koresh and the Branch Davidians engaged in a final, brutal shootout with law enforcement on this week in 1993, ending with the entire compound exploding into flames. 81 people died.
Two years later to the day in 1995, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was destroyed by (at the time) the worst bombing on U.S. soil. 168 people were killed. (I was working in the Troy State University Library that day, and remember going to the box to pick up the afternoon newspapers. The picture on the front page was fireman Chris Fields holding the dying baby, Baylee Almon. I was so distraught I could barely finish the work day.)
The Virginia Tech shootings occurred on this week in 2007. 32 people died, and 17 others were wounded.
It was on this week in 2010 that the BP oil rig, Deepwater Horizon, exploded in the Gulf of Mexico and gushed oil for the next six months.
On this same week in 1999, two high school students terrorized Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, killing 13 people and injuring 21 others.
In 2013, the Boston Marathon bombings occurred, injuring 264 people and killing three.
We have unfortunately become too accustomed to bad news. Perhaps it’s the 24/7 media cycle that keeps things stirred up while we stay glued to electronic devices.
I am of the belief that we simply know more details about events, and know them sooner, than ever before in history.
The irony: the more we communicate, the less we care about others – or, more to the point, the more we know, the more we know we don’t know!
Michael Bird is a music teacher at Faulkner University.
