Yesterday Was Columbus Day. I Didn't Notice, Did You?

Yesterday was Columbus Day.   As is my usual custom each and every year, I barely noticed.   If not for the flurry of commercials on television announcing Columbus Day sales and the fact that the mail doesn't show up, I probably wouldn't notice or care at all.   I don't care about Columbus Day.  I've never cared about Columbus Day.  It was always that random day when no mail came, nothing more.  We didn't get a day off school.  (Though the Missus informs me that South Dakota does!  It's Indigenous People's Day!)

So it always surprises me that there's an eruption of outrage each and every year over a holiday that most people could give a damn about.  Specifically, there was this web comic, courtesy of The Oatmeal which pretty much tells us what everyone who's advanced beyond elementary school already knows:  namely that for a guy that did us all a solid by discovering The Bahamas, he was a gigantic tool.   The Oatmeal goes on to suggest that Bartolomé de las Casas would be a better person to name this holiday that nobody gives a shit about after.   De Las Casas was a pretty civilized dude by the standards of the time- after witnessing the cruelty of Spanish colonization, sold all his land, became a priest and worked tirelessly for the equality of indigenous peoples.  

Sounds pretty cool, right?   Except, ru-roh!   The Observation Deck pointed out that while De Las Casas was all about fair and decent treatment for indigenous people- but he thought that they would never survive slavery, so he advocated bringing over African slaves to do it instead.  They were hardier, he thought and could survive it better.  And while he repented later in life, he was still one of the fathers of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.  So, our postal workers should stay home for him, but not Columbus?

I don't know:  history is riddled with contradictions- and while the behavior of the Spanish imperialists horrifies us and the genocide that resulted- whether through conquest or through disease should be considered the disasters they are, by the standards of the time, there was nothing wrong with their behavior.   These were people that were still clinging to the idea that the Earth was flat.   In 1492, they hadn't even wrapped their heads around the Earth revolving around the sun.  Of course they held views about different people and cultures that in the modern age seem astonishingly ignorant.   It seems silly to judge them for it- after all, they really didn't know any better.  And I would really question just how much we honor Columbus, anyway-  like I said at the start of this post, I've never given a damn about Columbus Day.  Like the Pledge of Allegiance, it's one of those things that you sort of stop doing on a regular basis once you advance into junior high and high school.

Of course, there's another point of view that's very intriguing:  namely the idea that it's not Columbus or De Las Casas we should be celebrating but John Cabot or possibly Leif Erickson.  If you look at the 'New World' it more or less falls into three spheres:  the English speaking, Spanish speaking and Portuguese speaking worlds.   Columbus is incredibly important for the Spanish-speaking world.  Pedro Alvares Cabral would probably get some credit for the Portuguese speaking world (he discovered Brazil) but English speaking exploration didn't really kick off until John Cabot's voyage in 1497.

I'm sorry, I can't work up the outrage about this.  What happened afterwards- the slavery, disease- the loss of Tenochtitlan (which would be one of the Wonders of the World today, had it survived), the loss of culture and language that are slipping away with every passing day- those are matters worthy of our attention and outrage.   A holiday which adds up to one less day of junk mail and those copies of Ebony that someone subscribed to for me (why, I don't know) isn't.