I never know what to make of April 20th

I still remember being stuck in my eighth grade classroom. A shooting was all we knew at first, followed by a school shooting, a high school shooting, Columbine High School. There was panic, everyone wondering if we knew anyone, my mother's coworker wanting to find out if her daughter, a friend of the family who was later one of my bridesmaids, was all right.

I heard so much about it. Every year on this day, the interviews, the memories, the outright panic of it all and how it should affect us now, what can we do better, how can we prevent it?

And it's still happening. There were actually shootings before Columbine, but the number of deaths at a high school was shocking and with shootings happening more and more, I think there's almost a desensitizing effect the media has had. We commemorate this violence with names in the paper and pictures of the event happening. What about the positive?

April 20th is a strange day...there's the marijuana codename that's given today the gather and celebrate counterculture cannabis events, but there's a lot of other things people tend to mention.

Obviously, I already mentioned one, but also Hitler's birthday, the Deepwater Horizon oil well explosion, the Johnson Space Center shooting, the Bay of Pigs failure, the Ludlow massacre, you get the idea. However, not everything that should be commemorated gets mentioned on April 20th, we get so caught up in the death and negativity that we forget:

- Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard completed their first set of pasteurization tests in 1862, a major breakthrough furthering germ theory of disease and awareness of safer food consumption
-The Civil Rights Act of 1871 came into law, a small but vital step toward later advances in equality
-Pierre and Marie Curie separated one-tenth gram of radium chloride using differential crystallization in 1902 to further scientific exploration and later medical uses.
-Apollo 16 landed on the moon in 1972
-Danica Patrick was the first women to win an Indy car race at the Indy Japan 300 in 2008

Sometimes I think we lose focus and allow one day to determine how we're going to feel or what we're going to do. The truth is, the date does not define the day, it's our willingness to open our eyes and improve the world that defines our day. Let you light shine and make today great, just like every other day.