Fall arrived Tuesday evening, so we are told. The orbit and tilt of the earth is not a thing that matches perfectly with our calendars, so this time it landed on September 22, which is actually more common than the 21st.
If you want just a touch of science (I know you do), what’s happening is that the tilt of the earth, as it swings in its orbit around the sun, is such that the sun is crossing the equator around September 22 (directly overhead there at noon). Unfortunately for us, it’s on its way down south of that, eventually to over the imaginary line from our school globes called the Tropic of Capricorn. It reaches there about December 21, when we in the northern hemisphere enjoy our shortest day of the year. You remember that: getting dark at four in the afternoon, no light in the morning until almost eight o’clock.
Tuesday was called the Fall Equinox or the “Autumnal Equinox” if we want to be even more verbose— meaning “equal night”, but it’s really meaning equal day and night.
I once spent a year in Resolute Bay, up on the arctic islands, as a weather observer in what now seems like a previous life. Like down here, September 22 is the usual “equinox” in Resolute, with equal day and night, but the sun is at such a low angle there that in the winter it can’t get over the horizon at all (I’ll keep referring to the sun doing something, which we humans have done since the beginning of time, though it’s us who are really doing most of the moving). In the summer, it manages to shine at a low angle right over the North Pole, such that it’s seen all day. I lived in the “Land of the Midnight Sun”.
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Is this sickness something new? I think not. That’s both good and bad. If it were entirely new, we might expect it to be growing, which I certainly hope it isn’t. I suspect this kind of thing happened throughout history, but one reason it’s in our face every year or so is the media of today—we live in a much smaller world. While in 1960 we might not have been presented the story of a situation in Woodstock, Ontario, in 2009 it gets delivered to us daily until it’s over (and then some). There may be some argument that with the Internet and other such things, child pornography has grown and triggered this kind of crime. I don’t know. Often investigations of such relationships indicate that while it might seem more blatant today, it was unfortunately always there. 
I know that the Baby Boomers like myself have been controlling most of western society for the last decades, and I know that we have also been controlling much of the radio airwaves for a while as well, resulting in the abundance of “easy listening”, “gold rock”, and similar approaches to programming as an attempt to please us, but to be honest, judging from the irritating stuff from our local stations in this area, I thought the effect was fading.