Friends on Facebook have been posting interesting sayings regarding Columbus day: Let's Celebrate Columbus Day by walking into someone's house and telling them we live there now. Or this: If the Somalia pirates discover something while they are murdering and robbing like Columbus did, will we make a holiday for them?
It's easy and fashionable to denigrate Columbus and, by extension, the European colonization of the Americas. The indigenous peoples were treated horribly--killed, enslaved, relocated, absorbed. I have two thoughts on this trend:
(1) Anyone willing to give up their house or land so that we can return this continent to its state in the 16th century? I didn't think so.
(2) Europe desired to explore and expand. Anything inherently wrong with that? When arriving on this continent, they were technologically light-years ahead of those people who resided here and those people didn't exactly fill the lands, but only lived in a few areas. So what were the colonists to do? Turn around and go home?
Should they have acted differently? Absolutely. But this does not excuse the smug self-righteous exercise of demonizing Columbus and the exploration of the New World. Can we have a little balance here?
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I will stay out of the whole Columbus day debate. Instead I will share a quote I stole from Steve Stuckers FaceBook page:
ReplyDeleteColumbus was a TYPICAL Male, didn't want to stop & ask for directions! He is Famous in Spite of the fact that he Didn't Know Where he was Going Before he left, & Didn't Know Where he Was, Once He Arrived!!
I like that. It's not just male though. I was at a meeting and Tina and two other pastor's wives were going to go to the mall. I asked if she would pick up a computer keyboard for me at the computer store right across the freeway from the mall. She did so and then she and her new friends proceeded to get on the freeway instead of across it (they were talking naturally). They ended up at a completely different mall and then had trouble finding their way back. When I asked her what mall they ended up at, she didn't know. Ever since she has been Christopher Columbus to me--didn't get to the place she was going to and didn't know where she had been when she got back.
ReplyDelete