We do not celebrate
Columbus Day and at the risk of pissing off a whole new set of
customers, I’ll go into a little rant here. I think that Columbus Day
is an offensive and blatantly racist holiday. Columbus didn’t discover
anything, not withstanding the cities, streets, and even countries
named after him. Everywhere Columbus landed there existed indigenous
people. His reaction to those people was to torture and enslave them
with the ultimate result of one of the worse cases of genocide in the
history of the world. Columbus never touched North America, was not the
first outsider to visit any of the places he visited, and his visits
were not welcomed by the native peoples.
If an alien species came to earth and zapped us with their ray guns and
took our families off to their planet as slaves, I don’t think we would
be celebrating Alien Day with parades and the closing of the post
office and banks.
Jack Weatherford wrote in “Examining the Reputation of Christopher
Columbus”:
“The United States honors only two men with federal holidays bearing
their names. In January we commemorate the birth of Martin Luther King
Jr. who struggled to lift the blinders of racial prejudice and to cut
the remaining bonds of slavery in America. In October we honor
Christopher Columbus who opened the Atlantic slave trade and launched
one of the greatest waves of genocide known in history.”
Perhaps it is time to drop Columbus Day and celebrate Native Americans
with Indigenous People day! I realize that this is not a popular
concept. The last time I wrote about Columbus Day, I had an in-box full
of mail saying I was anti-Italian. That’s not the point, I think that
Columbus was not a very good example of the enormous contributions of
Italians to our country and culture.