April Fool's Day

I consider myself to have a pretty good sense of humor, but I've never been a big fan of April Fool's Day. I like jokes, and can certainly laugh at myself (I do on a regular basis), but it seems to me that the vast majority of people use this day as an excuse to be mean to others. If you just say "April Fools!" afterward, it supposedly makes it all okay. Perhaps because I spend my days with adolescents I have a skewed view of the way people 'celebrate' this day, but the reality is that manufacturing a scheme to make someone else look or feel foolish just seems mean-spirited and wrong. We spend most of the year teaching our kids that laughing at someone else's misfortune is in poor character, and then on this one sanctioned day out of the year, all bets are off and they are celebrated for the most elaborate and clever tricks they can devise.

I had a girl in class one year who had an incredible crush on a popular boy. The boy thought it would be funny to ask her out on April 1st as a joke, knowing how thrilled she would be to get such attention from him. That is not mere tomfoolery, people; it's plain cruelty. When I pointed that out, I was chastised for taking things too seriously. I don't get it. If that means that I spend each April 1st being accused of somehow lacking a sense of humor, so be it.