Monday is Columbus Day in America. It’s a holiday that was created by Democrats in 1937 as a means of tossing a political bone to Italian-Americans — then an important Democratic Party constituency. It’s a traditional day of celebration for Italian-Americans and is as important to many of them as St. Patrick’s Day is to Irish-Americans and Pulaski Day is to Poles.
It’s also become a day for shameless moral posturing by those on the left who love to stir the pot and get people riled up.
The essence of their objections — that Columbus was a rapacious colonizer who terrorized Native Americans — is absolutely true, at least when judging him by our current perfect moral standards. How that makes him different from any other European of the 15th century is a mystery.
In truth, Christopher Columbus was a jerk — a disagreeable, cruel, unjust, ship’s captain and viceroy whose colonists eventually grew tired of the abuse and mutinied.
But leaving the man’s faults aside, Columbus should be lionized and remembered for one thing: a report on his first voyage to the New World that energized young men across Europe and jumpstarted the “Age of Discovery.” This period of time between 1500-1600 revolutionized the world as much as the passenger jet did in the 1950s.
Only leftists blinded by ideology and a desire to destroy history and the ignorant young want us to let go of Columbus. To that end, Campus Reform entered the fever swamps at the University of California-Irvine and asked students if Columbus Day should be replaced as “Indigenous People’s Day.” The result was, at times, hilarious.
“Because Columbus, like from what I remember in history, he enslaved a lot of Native Americans or like he caused a lot of like slaughters for them,” one student claimed.
Another student agreed, adding that “White people” have “stomped” over Native American culture.
“Especially in America we need to respect, like, that culture. They were here first. It’s their culture and us as White people we have kind of stomped all over it.”
Yes, but was Columbus a “white supremacist”?
“Yes I would [call him a white supremacist] because of all the plagues he brought, of the oppression of Native Americans that is still here today,” one student said.
“Americans, we teach white history,” another student added. “We don’t teach a lot of other cultures’ history. We only teach like white American American history.”
White supremacists have a specific ideology. Christopher Columbus was unaware of that ideology and wouldn’t know what that kid was talking about.
We are judging Columbus by a morality that he wouldn’t have understood nor been familiar with. Does that alone make him a bad man?
“I don’t quite understand the celebration of what Columbus Day is, or is supposed to be, because I haven’t really experienced it in any real sense. It actually wasn’t until I moved here that I was really in a place that referred to the holiday as Columbus Day and not Native American Heritage Day,” van Heuvelen said.
The question of what exactly we’re celebrating Monday has gotten more attention in recent years, but it has been going on for decades.
While a politically-created holiday, acknowledgment of Columbus and his contributions to the modern world should continue. He was heroic in the sense that few people, even today, would get into a relatively tiny boat and sail across the unknown ocean hoping to hit land before their food and water run out. The snowflake lefties in the video above sure as hell wouldn’t have had the courage. That alone should mark Columbus for distinction, if not veneration.
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