LF: The strange history of April 20, from Hitler to Deepwater Horizon

Title: The strange history of April 20, from Hitler to Deepwater Horizon
Source: New York Daily News
URL Source: http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pa ... om-hitler-to-deepwater-horizon
Published: Apr 20, 2012
Author: Alexander Nazaryan
Post Date: 2012-04-20 19:47:45 by Brian S
Keywords: None
Views: 4509
Comments: 1

In terms of world history, it would be hard to compete with April 20 for the title of Worst Day of the Year.

I don't quite know why, and I think any explanation of the day's significance would be incomplete.

Pre-modern people believed in the alignment of the stars and planets being responsible for mankind's collective fate.

For example, in Shakespeare's "King Lear," feeling that something is amiss, Gloucester says, "These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us." He wasn't talking about April 20, but he easily could have been. Same for T.S. Eliot when he called April "the cruelest month."

On what might otherwise be a fine spring day, it certainly seems that way.

Most infamously, today is the birthday of Adolf Hitler, who arrived into this world, much to its eventual chagrin, on April 20, 1889. (Hitler's birthday being marked in Times Square on April 20, 1942 / Photo by Herb Breuer, NYDN)

But plenty of other major catastrophes have, oddly enough, taken place on April 20, at least if Wikipedia is to be believed.

In 1914, April 20 was the date of one of the worst atrocities committed against American workers, at the Rockefeller owned Ludlow coal mine in Colorado, where a strike was taking place. After the Colorado National Guard was sent in - at the Rockefellers' indirect behest - some 20 people were killed, many of them women and children, who suffocated after a hole where they had been hiding filled with smoke. Plenty of Americans held John D. Rockefeller Jr. personally responsible for the callous treatment of the mine workers.

April 20, 1978, saw the infamous "interception" of Korean Air Lines flight 902 (on a Paris-Anchorage-Seoul route) by Soviet jets, in a narrowly-avoided aviation disaster. After straying into Soviet airspace over Murmansk, not far from the border with Finland in Russia's far north, the Boeing 707 was fired upon by Soviet Su-15 jets. Two people were killed, but the jet made an emergency landing, saving the rest of the 107 people on board. For many, though, this was a sign that the Soviet Union remained a violent and defensive empire.

Twenty-one years later to the day, two Colorado teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, entered the grounds of their high school, where they were seniors and started firing, first in the cafeteria and eventually in the library, where most of the killing took place. The Columbine massacre of April 20, 1999, would leave 13 dead and the nation's psyche forever altered with the inaccurate but indelible image of the Trench Coat Mafia. (Columbine High School students react to shooting / AP Photo/Rocky Mountain News, George Kochanie)

Deepwater Horizon, the BP oil rig stationed (not all that securely, it would turn out) in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, exploded on April 20, 2010, killing 11 and altering the lives of millions in the region. For months, the world was treated with images of black plumes, dark waters and oil-covered wild life. Just this week, scientists found that Gulf fish still bear traces of contamination.

And last year, while reporting from Libya, the photojournalists Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros were killed on this day by a mortar shell in Misrata. Their deaths struck a particular cord in New York, where they were members of a tightly-knit photo community based mostly in Brooklyn.

But oddly enough, April 20, or 4/20, is "celebrated" by pot smokers around the country. Across the nation, teenagers and college students earnestly get baked, extolling their love of cannabis - one of whose qualities is the erosion of memory.

Certainly, as far as global events are concerned, today is one the world might want to forget.

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