Columbus Day

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two,
Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

This he did indeed. In the generation that has passed since the 500th anniversary of this voyage, Columbus has become a main icon of Old World violence visited on the New. He's the bad guy, and Columbus Day changed quickly from a free day off, to a day we mark with embarrassment and apology. Is that fair?

America in the 21st century is arguably as violent a place as anywhere in Columbus' times. (Check here and here for starters, and let a library point you to 1,000 other sources.) This is based on many complex factors, not the least of which is that Europeans brought to these shores their culture of impressive violence. Once in the new world, French, English, Spanish and Native Americans shot and hacked at each other for about 300 years. Their descendants turned on each other, probably salving their doubts about the violence they all rained upon slaves and Indians. In the present, we export our anger to smaller nations that are convenient targets for economic tantrums, and we allow our kids to kill each other regularly in school.

We are a violent people, that's for sure.

So how is this Columbus's fault? Well, it's very convenient to blame others for our own problems, especially if they are historical, and the fashion is to condemn the past. But one can easily condemn the past:

• Our Founding Fathers crafted an representative government, but many held slaves.
• The Spanish colonized America to gain wealth and save souls, but church and soldiers alike destroyed natives by the millions.
• Showing total disregard for humanity, world leaders fought World War I using mechanized weaponry, but with pre-mechanized strategies. Eight and a half million people were killed in four and a half years.

Only assholes do these things.

Leading Opinion insists history is a continuum of human activity. We are no more removed from Columbus as we are from Watergate, just because we remember one more vividly. You see, all people do stuff, great and small, that affects people around them. Younger people carry the effects over, do stuff of their own, affect others... Before you know it, four generations and 100 years have passed. History is ongoing, and it changes just as every day changes for you—you see the effects when you compare your appearance to your high school graduation photo, but you always feel like the same 18-year-old. Time feels like it moves around you and past you; you age in place, while TV shows change and people older than you pass away.

So that's what happened to Columbus, too. He did his thing, made a little money and got a good pedigree for his time. (And he came from pretty much nothing.) The Americas were ransacked, but it wasn't his problem because he gave them to Spain, pretty much. Spain was powerful and mean, between wars as it was with two other powerful and mean entities. America was a chance to both expand and get away from Europe, and all of Europe thought so. Naturally, they took their European (powerful and mean) realities to America and killed everything in reach. People in the lead at any given time or place, since 1492, inherited the realities and carry on the traditions, down to today when we kill each other over arguments about who's actually killing each other. In sum, Columbus didn't really start it; he had antecedent Columbuses of his own, going back into the mists of time.

We really are a violent people, and kid ourselves that the violence is self-defense, or justified in some other way. "I do violence only because he did it first!" And so often done in the name of a man who insisted that we take it, let violence happen to us, if we want to break the chain.

So let's let Columbus be. If we wish to find the locus of violence against innocents in the world, or over time, let's look no further than our immediate sphere. Teach your descendents that bullying is bad, that fighting is unnecessary, that guns are dangerous. Be nice to each other, help out in small ways. (BIG ways, if you're so inclined.) Hug people you love, maybe even some you don't, laugh as often as you can. Do yoga. These small actions will make your sphere better; several spheres together make an ecosystem; several ecosystems make an environment.

From there, many environments make a world.

Discover a new world! Happy Columbus Day!