Happy?! Columbus Day from Eric

Remember this rhyme: “In 1492, Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue”? As an elementary school student, this holiday was an off-day, a day to commemorate the navigational skills, scientific knowledge, bravery, and moxie of a man who introduced America to Spain and who helped to bring civilization to a savage world. My friends and I, instead of playing touch football or hiding in leaf piles, spent our day-off expressing our gratitude to the Spirit of Columbus for getting us to this place of fortune and prosperity. Okay, that last part was a lie, but by giving us the day off, and by teaching us only the Columbian myth, my school implicitly perpetuated the notion that this man should be celebrated, and not heavily critiqued. Honestly, I find it ludicrous, but not hard to believe, that it has always been assumed we should, without question, honor the feats of Columbus, while, up until all-too recently, we debated whether or not to make Martin Luther King’s birthday a holiday.

True, Columbus changed the world. But not because he was able to challenge the flatness of the earth—in truth it was commonly held that the world was round, a theory that existed since at least 4th century BCE; and he didn’t change the world because he was a brilliant navigator—it was his inexperience as a navigator that convinced him, until his death, that he had found India’s eastern shore in the Caribbean. No, he changed the world because he popularized the notion that people who were darker and spoke different languages and who had different customs and cultures were commodities in themselves to be traded, whose land was something to be exploited, and who needed to be conformed, by force if needed, in order to achieve salvation. The wave of death and exploitation sparked by Columbus in Hispaniola and other conquistadors in Central and South America killed millions of human beings while filling European coffers with gold and other precious stones and metals. I believe that this was genocide fueled by greed and nothing else. I invite you today to read the Wikipedia article on Columbus and decide for yourself whether this man’s life should be celebrated or removed from the holiday rolls and remembered with great caution.

I think we have to take a hard look at the motivations for Columbus and the other conquistadors and wonder what similarities there are to how our country engages with the rest of the world today. Columbus claimed that much of what he did was to spread Christianity at all costs to all who could hear. Today, what messages are we spreading to justify our actions at all costs? Are these messages of freedom and democracy the real motivations for pursuing “free trade agreements” with countries that are considerably poorer than we are? Find out for yourself who really prospers and really suffers from such agreements. Columbus was initially welcomed by the first people he came into contact with—his people wore out the welcome once the acquisition of gold became their mission and began enslaving and killing people. How do we, now inhabitants of a land declared to be “ours” through Manifest Destiny’s deceptive treaties and unjust wars, welcome visitors who are different? Do we humbly welcome them home or do we act like this place was “ours” to begin with? Perhaps we are wearing wristbands that ask, What Would Columbus Do?…

In my opinion, in light of the genocide and the exploitation of Central and South American countries that has not stopped since it was begun by the likes of this man, to honor Columbus is comparable to honoring Adolph Hitler, Saddam Hussein, or Henry Kissinger. I would gladly choose to work on this day, and will always encourage school districts to not honor this federally declared “holiday.”