April 1st 2010    Tim Candler

    The worst place to be on April Fools Day is boarding school.  I don't mean those polite little social clubs where the wealthy send their children to learn proper adjustment and how best to lead an entitled life.  I mean those boarding schools that took Sparta's treatment of  youth as a model for character building.  Dress them in suits and ties, allow the strong  to whip the weak and teach them Geography.

     No doubt in my mind those places produced character.  True, Kings and Queens always need their equivalent to a motorcycle gang.   And too, there is a camaraderie in places of woe that gives a value to intolerance.   Which is probably why continuous economic growth appears as a necessary prerequisite for groupings that call themselves nations.

    The objection to tolerance has always belonged to an idea that without oneness failure is inevitable.  Without shared ambition, they argue, there is decline into disparate and competing groups.  So I imagine it'll be on an April Fools day that pluralism will finally meet a guillotine.

     Incidentally, this foul mood of mine follows the barking of a neighbors dog, my complete inability to germinate Wax Gourd and a Bunny that last night breached vegetable garden defenses.  

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