Goodbye, Columbus

I’ve wrestled balancing my love of world history with my appreciation of American history and at no time of the year is that struggle harder than right now as we prepare to observe the second Monday of this month as a federal holiday, Columbus Day.

I’m thinking that if I can write down my misgivings, exorcise my demons so to speak, it might make more sense than to struggle silently. What we call history depends on both the tale and the teller. We can be right and we can be wrong at the same time but history records every action without blinking or judging.

This Monday is the Columbus Day holiday, even for those who are a chagrined that we still celebrate it (I understand how and why people who do feel that way arrived at their position and wonder if Indigenous Peoples' Day isn’t a better and more inclusive name than the one we’ve grown accustomed to. Christofo is a man who inspires passions on all sides).  

And now, as sure as the dot on the "i" in Monday holiday, we have another excuse (and sales opportunity) to buy bedding or is that just me in the last couple of days? Turn the TV on and on every channel, it seems, sandwiched between the 'My candidate is great but yours eats bugs" election campaign commercials is a steady stream of advertising selling mattresses. I've never understood why, and they don’t need my permission because there they are. Another way we know it’s a holiday I guess.

Growing up in the suburbs of New York City, Columbus Day was a big deal. The Department of Public Works painted the white line on Fifth Avenue purple for the annual parade that was always held on the real date of the holiday, October 12 and was always televised. 

In remembering that as a man who has celebrated his sixty-sixth birthday, I now know what a boy of twelve didn't about the Rape of Paradise which ensued after Columbus' arrival, I wonder if blood red might have been a better choice of colors for the line on Fifth Avenue. 

When I was a kid, all I ever cared about was the day off, just like school children across the country. We all recited the rhyme because that's how we knew what we did know about Columbus and since there wasn't a snappy couplet about colonialism (hard to rhyme?) we didn't know anything about that aspect of his discoveries and would have called it "fake news" if the term had existed. 

Speaking of facts that never were, is that Columbus did not discover the New World. We've spent hundreds of years observing a historical event that is neither historic nor actual. Sort of like being the second runner-up in a three-legged race.

Looking at the world as it is now and how all settlement and civilization has developed, I'm not sure it's just Old Chris we should be putting in the defendant's dock and charging. I'm thinking a long look in the mirror in addition to a glance out of a window might significantly improve our tolerance and acceptance of one another for who we are which would certainly be something worth celebrating all year round.
-bill kenny