Columbus Day

For years and years and years, this nation has committed a day on the calendar to honor our nation’s “discoverer,” Christopher Columbus. Federal buildings, offices and operations take the day off as they do on only 8 other specific Holidays throughout the year. Since the day has recently passed, I would just like to briefly spout about how sad it is that we celebrate the memory of such a treacherous individual.

“In Fourteen-Hundred and Ninety-Two, Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue.” Certainly anyone that grew up when I did, in the USA, has heard that rhyme recited time and time again. It refers to Cristobal Colon (Christopher Columbus…let’s just call him “CC”), and how he led a mission from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) to discover the New World. Among the “facts” I was taught for several years concerning CC were that CC proved that the world wasn’t flat, CC discovered America, CC wanted to trade spices with the Indians, and a handful of other accolades.

Since I was a 4th grader, “new” facts concerning CC have come to light. Apparently he wasn’t the one to prove that the world wasn’t flat, neither was he the first to navigate from Europe to the new world (he was preceded by at least 400 years by the Vikings). Furthermore, he didn’t even discover the America’s, that distinction has been ascribed to Amerigo Vespucci. And what’s more, despite our national holiday in his honor, Columbus never even set foot on United States’ mainland soil. He drifted from island to island in the Caribbean. Oh yeah, and spice trading…looks more like spice stealing to me.

So at best we can say that Columbus succeeded in traveling from Europe westward to what is now known as the America’s. He made this voyage a reproducible anomaly. And that’s about it.

Now here’s what we should really remember Columbus for. Columbus and his men made immediate enemies of the indigenous peoples living in the Caribbean. Maybe most notable was his leading the enslavement, massacre, pilfering, and rape of the Taino people in what we now know as Puerto Rico. Oh, and I should briefly mention that he and his men brought along with them a host of diseases that the indigenous peoples had no immune system to fight off.

CC is heavily responsible for much of the slave trading that marred the America’s for centuries, and whose explicit effects ended only a few decades ago in the USA. He learned from many European nations, like Portugal, how to trade for African slaves. He then arranged for these slaves shipment to the West Indies and forced them to work the land (full of cash crops like Sugar Cane) for his own personal gain.

Can someone please remind me again why we celebrate Columbus Day, complete with parades around the nation, and a Federal day off?

It would seem to me that a person who led the extermination and enslavement of one group of people, coupled with the displacement and enslavement of another group of people, would be a point of disdain and not accolade.

For real now, did he even accomplish anything reputable? He didn’t discover the America’s, he never made it to India to trade spices, he led a 16th century genocide, he didn’t even touch the USA mainland, and this is a guy that we’re going to halt the nation for and honor?

Funny how twisted this nation is.

It took marches on Washington, rallies, and even a Stevie Wonder tune to honor the memory of a truly remarkable man, Martin Luther King Jr. Indeed, there are members of Congress and in our Nation’s Judicial system to this day that voted against the MLK Holiday, and were in total opposition to it. So I gather that leading genocide is far more praise-worthy than leading non-violent campaigns of racial, social and economic equality.

I guess that I’m just frustrated with these “elephant in the room” issues. We talk about, debate, and discuss how women are paid 30 cents less than a man doing the same job, how teachers (who help develop multi-millionaire entertainers into who they are) are paid such pitiful wages, how the purchase of large gas-guzzling vehicles is financially wasteful/foolish, and about a bazillion other things; yet we never take steps to rectify these obvious “sillinesses.”

And one of the silliest notions that I can think of, with respect to national holidays, is to shut down the government in honor of a pillaging loser like Christopher Columbus; putting his name and reputation on par with Martin Luther King Jr. in January, and this nation’s Veterans in November. There seems to be some serious inequality in that very thought.

Since I know the task of erasing a National Holiday, no matter how unmerited it is, is a virtual impossibility, I at least hope that we tell the truth about Columbus and turn the day into an educational opportunity. In no way should he be praised, and certainly the people that became victims of his greed for prominence should be remembered and their history taught and honored.

It would be nice, sometime in the near future, to receive mail (no matter how full of bills it is) on the 2nd Monday in October. That would tell me that the nation has finally awakened.

-Maelstrom