Columbus

Seattle Washington is once again acting out its silly liberal mantra by no longer celebrating Columbus Day … see: NPR Story. There, it now will be called Indigenous People Day and will diss Christopher in favor of the advanced and peace-loving civilizations that he found in this half of the world in 1492.

I guess I really don’t understand Starbucks City’s logic in this matter. Would it have preferred that Indians were still hunting beavers in the Cascade Mountains and Seattle was never created? (This is kind of like a child wishing that its parents had used contraceptives ...) Rewriting history based upon some notion of perfect morality on the part of one group of people is pie-in-the-sky. Would the “indigenous people” ever have fully exploited the resources that were here in this hemisphere if Columbus had turned back half-way across the Atlantic? Surely, someone else would have discovered that the world was round and so inhabited this new land … maybe with even less humanity.

Playing this shoulda, woulda, coulda game is raucously ridiculous. There was clearly a certain manifest destiny to Columbus’s discovery. Personally, I am quite happy that Ferdinand and Isabella threw the dice and funded Columbus in his dangerous adventure (and also threw the moors … read Muslims … out of Spain.)

Afterward: I read that Minneapolis has also opted to deep-six Columbus ... see: Goodbye, Columbus.