Jim Huggins (jkhuggins) wrote,
Jim Huggins
jkhuggins
  • Mood: cranky

an old man rants about April Fool's day

I really hate April Fool's Day. 

It's cruel.  It is a day on which:
  1. The people that you normally trust, implicitly, have free license to lie to you.
  2. When your friends construct a believable lie, and you believe them (because you trust them, right?), they laugh at you.
  3. When you are humiliated by their laughter, you're told that "it's just a joke" and made to feel even worse.  It's a classic case of blaming the victim.
It is a day on which we are trained to abandon our natural trust for one another, and to be inherently suspicious.

I'm doing my usual work-avoiding web-surfing right now ... and it's annoying.  Sure, the obvious ridiculous parodies from well known sources (like Google or CarTalk) are funny.  But then I see an "unusual" news story from a reputable source (like the Detroit Lions assigning parking spaces to their players), and I have to sit there and try and figure out whether it's just a bizarre new story or an April Fool's joke.  (Because when your football team is 0-16, there's no story that's not believable.)

Why do we encourage people to be cruel to one another?

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