So, an interesting anecdote of living in Washington state. Yesterday, the Seattle city council voted, unanimously, to eliminate the celebration of Columbus Day from their city calendar and instead call it Indigenous Peoples Day.. because as the supporters stated, they did not want to celebrate a day dedicated to the man responsible for the genocide of the native peoples of North and South America. Ok - Ill bite... Native peoples in the north, central and south Americas have been preying on each other for hundreds of years, warring, enslaving and wiping out each others tribes long before white men settled on these shores. The history of the human race is about migration, warfare and technical advances - rinse and repeat. Columbus Day was about the celebration of men with visions, acting on those visions and advancing their countries agenda and global prestige through the action of that vision. Columbus was not responsible for genocide of a people, he was a small cog in the grand machine - the leadership of Spain, France, England, Portugal, and later the fledgeling United States and Russia were responsible for creating the environments that led to the genocide. Both secular and religious leadership of those nations endorsed the manifest destiny that created this nation and the tragedies that ensued... Columbus Day should be left as is for the lessons of the consequences of the vision and a SEPARATE DAY should have been established to celebrate the Indigenous Americans, wiping away the mans holiday does not wipe away the lesson we should all take from the consequences of having a vision - it is a lesson to take in, to consider all the resulting actions that can come from a limited vision of grandeur, so we have a better future...
Posted on: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 23:11:52 +0000
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