The Riddle of Columbus Day

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?