April 1, That One Full Day of Wisdom

April, as T S Eliot reminds us in his by-now poem of realism, 'The Waste Land', is 'the cruellest month breeding/ lilacs out of the dead land'. We seem to have moved - environmentally, geopolitically, existentially - far from Chaucer's happy description of the advent of spring from the prologue of his 'The Canterbury Tales': 'Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote/ The droghte of March hath perced to the roote' (When April with its sweet showers/ The drought of March has pierced to the root). So, perhaps we, in our infinite idiocy, should rethink crowning April 1 as the official carnival of foolishness, pranks and hoaxes. With the other 364 days of the year already a global improv act of incompetence, misinformation and mendacity, why designate today as April Fools' Day when every headline already reads like a Monty Python sketch rewritten by Kafka?

Let's flip it. Let April 1 be the one day when wisdom, truth, kindness and politeness are still celebrated as virtues, not silliness. One day when Twitter/Truth Social pauses its gladiatorial combat, when politicians are legally required to answer questions with facts, when your neighbour greets you with courtesy instead of passive-aggressive noise - one day of sanity, surrounded by year-round lunacy that we seem to have normalised. April 1 as Wisdom Day would be the greatest, fittest joke of all.