Columbus Day has me feeling… happy?

Today is Columbus Day – at least in most of the countries that celebrate it. I hate Columbus Day! I’ve always hated Columbus Day. Long before it was cool to hate Columbus Day, I hated Columbus Day. October has always been my favorite month of the year because of how it is the buildup to Halloween, and Columbus Day has always been this big ugly stain that ruins that! This year though, I feel different. I feel optimistic… I actually feel… happy. And Columbus day just isn’t bothering me anymore.

It’s not like it’s any less infuriating that this holiday exists in the first place. It’s supposed to commemorate that day, 531 years ago, on 12 October, 1492, when Christopher Columbus made landfall in what today is called the Bahamas, officially marking the end of the barbaric European Middle Ages and the start of the even more barbaric Early Modern Era. More specifically, it’s supposed to honor the man himself, giving him credit for proving the world is round and discovering the Americas. And he completely didn’t do either of those things! 🤦🏻‍♀️

The ancient Greeks had already proven the world was round, and they even had a measurement of the Earth’s circumference that was wrong by only about 5%! Christopher Columbus though – he misunderstood the units of measurement in some old documents and thought the Earth’s circumference was about 3/4 the size it actually is. And he was too pig-headedly stubborn for anybody at the time to be able to reason with him about it!

Christopher Columbus’s warped view of the globe meant he expected to arrive in Southeast Asia, aka ‘the Indies’ if he sailed West. And at pretty close the moment he expected to reach the Indies, he arrived at the Bahamas. So he thought he’d arrived in the Indies, and it’s why he called the local Native Americans ‘Indians’. And guess what? He lived his whole life, making two more trips there, without ever realizing his mistake. So not only was he not the first human to discover the Americas (since Native American ancestors had already done that tens of thousands of years ago), and not only was he not the first White person to discover the Americas (Leif Erikson did that hundreds of years prior), but Christopher Columbus never even discovered the Americas at all! 🙄

And not only did Mr. Columbus discover nothing, but he was also one of the most monstrous humans in recorded history. He tortured, he enslaved, and he even committed complete, successful genocides against entire races of people, all in the name of fame, wealth, and power. He was even mean to his own men! And his cruelty kickstarted a process that ultimately resulted what is probably the greatest loss of cultural and genetic diversity for homo sapiens in their entire 300,000-year history. 🙁

Why do humans have a day to celebrate this man? I still don’t know. But what I do know is that people are finally really starting to ask that same question of themselves, and they’re realizing that they don’t really know either!

Indigenous Peoples’ day is now a thing – at least in the USA. It’s a deliberate attempt to steamroll over Columbus Day, replacing it with a holiday that declares the inherent worth, dignity, and entitlement to happiness of the people Christopher Columbus saw as nothing more than meat to slaughter and grind into a profit. American President Joe Biden formally acknowledged the new holiday in 2021, making it official. Yes, there are still conservative groups that complain about the clear threat to their precious tradition of honoring a monster, but they’re fighting a losing battle. They can hold out for years still, but they are not going to win this. And once the USA falls to the power of sanity, it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the Western world does too! 😃

Sometimes it feels like the Liberals even go a bit too far in promoting Indigenous Peoples’ Day. They act like these conquered groups of people were somehow innocent, helpless little animals. They weren’t. They were human beings, and like any human society, they had their share of blood on their hands. They murdered and bullied and stole each other’s land by force. They raped and enslaved each other. They exterminated whole tribes for the crime of being different from them. To say otherwise, I think, is to deny them their humanity, and that’s a really racist thing to do! And it’s true too that even though Christopher Columbus doesn’t deserve credit for actually achieving anything, his landfall on 12 October, 1492 was still a super big deal, with how it came to transform the entire world. It does make sense, I think, to have a day acknowledging that significance. It doesn’t have to be a celebratory affair to still be something people do.

But even where they stray too far, their hearts are in the right place. And the people who actually still like this holiday and remain fans of Mr. Columbus find themselves having to argue he somehow really wasn’t as evil as recorded history establishes him to be. Because in today’s culture, it’s just not okay to look up to a greedy, sociopathic racial supremacist anymore. Human attitudes have changed in so many ways – at least in the Western World, and that’s spreading to the rest of the world too! And even though it’s come along with the burden of hyperpolarized, dysfunctional Western politics and the toxic bile of social media contaminating everything, I think it’s been worth it. All that is just growing pains, and the positive trend is impossible not to see. Gone are the days when ‘Whites and Coloreds’ had to use separate bathrooms and drinking fountains. Gone are even the 1990s, when it was still acceptable for even children’s shows to make fun of people for being fat or wanting to wear the clothing arbitrarily assigned to the opposite sex. And gone are the days somebody could actually wipe out, or attempt to wipe out, an entire race of people without international outcry. The forces of good are winning. And even through my broken brain’s naturally pessimistic filter, I am finally starting to see that.

And so for the first time on this day of the year, I feel I finally have something worth smiling about. And I feel at peace.

Happy Columbus Day everyone! 🙂