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Mid-April in America Is an Unforgiving Time, and Now This

Associated Press

   For a generation, mid-April has delivered some of American life's most
   cataclysmic moments -- a week when young men have shot up schools,
   terrorists have blown up fellow humans, members of a religious sect
   have burned to death in their compound and environmental calamity has
   sullied the ocean.

   Now, as those traumatic, unwelcome anniversaries of the past 27 years
   roll by in the space of a single spring week, one of the most
   disruptive moments in all of American history is still unfolding: the
   coronavirus, and the efforts to contain it.

   What is it about this week in April, anyway? And what does it mean --
   for survivors, and for all Americans -- to move through this barrage of
   violent memories knowing that life as we know it, at least for now, has
   gone away?

   "In April, things tend to happen. I don't think it's an accident that a
   lot of events take place in April. That's the month that people have
   been waiting for," said John Baick, a historian at Western New England
   University in Massachusetts.

   He has been noticing the propensity for upheaval in April since he was
   in college.

   'Something about the spring'

   "There is," Baick said, "something about the spring that goes against
   rationality."

   It was easy to believe it on Monday, 25 years after the Oklahoma City
   bombing and the day after the 21st anniversary of the Columbine High
   School shootings in Colorado -- and, not entirely incidentally, a day
   after Canada's deadliest mass shooting.

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