A Cruel April Fool
The calendar has now switched, from March to April. If someone had settled into a Rip Van Winkle-like nap on Leap Day and missed the whole month, waking up today…they’d find much had changed in that single 31-day period.
As March began, much of America was focused on the Democrat presidential race, with Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders battling it out…with Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigeig…those three were still in the race at that point.
The Dow had had a rough week the last week of February, dropped from a high of nearly 30,000 points…but the market was poised for a big increase that first week of March.
School children, college students, and families alike were finalizing spring break plans.
And officials in this country’s largest cities were encouraging people to participate in tourism activities, because whatever that Chinese Virus was wouldn’t affect us much here.
That Rip Van Winkle who woke up today to see the news would look at the calendar and presume it was all an April Fool’s Day joke. But it’s hardly a laughing matter.
The presidential race has been all but forgotten. Schools are closed. The Dow shed all the gains it had made since the Trump election. And people are dying, literally, in numbers hard to fathom.
Who would have thought just a month ago that we’d be cautiously leaving our homes in a desperate search for toilet paper.
So good riddance to March, and hello to April. I hope you do us better. But I fear not.
