Reviews for The School of Homer

Monday, October 11, 2004

Happy Columbus Day!

While tomorrow is actually the real Columbus Day, marking the 512th anniversary of the great day when Christopher Columbus discovered the New World, today is the day we observe the event.

This used to be done by parades, but now is done mostly with head hung low as people all over the country have been brow-beaten into feeling guilty for Columbus Day. Everything that went bad after Columbus discovered America, i.e. the spreading of diseases due to the gap of civilization between advanced Europeans and primitive Americans, etc, is supposed to be blamed on Columbus and then even more absurdly, on us.

Why? Because some people who had 50,000 years of unfettered time and space in which to develop great cultures to rival Europe (and which had finally begun happening about 1000-500 years before Columbus arrived, but obviously much too late to alter the course of history) and did not ended up being overwhelmed, assimilated, or destroyed by Europeans anxious to start anew in the New World. For this, we are to be condemned and made to feel guilty for eternity, because Europeans developed ships capable of carrying men back and forth across the Atlantic and developed weapons that allowed several hundred men to conquer millions (with a little help from disgruntled tribes the Incas and Aztecs ticked off). Not to mention the fact that Europeans had the gall to domestic animals and raise them for livestock (i.e. cows and pigs) thereby coming into contact and developing immunities to nasty things like smallpox, which a culture not yet developed to the stage of animal husbandry could not possibly deal with. Thank God the Europeans weren't convinced of their utter depravity and inferiority to those whom they displaced before they came up with cures to many of the diseases of the world, like smallpox.

The multicultural hysteria surrounding Columbus Day and the political effort to remain it "Indigenous People's Day" is just an outgrowth of the same irrational desire to worship the primitive "way of life" that created and continues to feed environmentalism and most other forms of loony leftism in the world.

While we must acknowledge and embrace the reality that Columbus was a man, not a God (like all men) we must also acknowledge his great achievements. He was a persistent man with a vision of doing something no one else had accomplished, not finding a new world, but opening a quick sea route for trade with China and India. When he found the New World (and eventually realized it was a New World) he quickly went about the task of trying to develop it for civilization.

Englishmen, of whom we Americans descend at least ideologically, were able to make a new start thanks to Columbus's pioneering voyage of discovery and his navigation charts and writings which allowed others to trace his steps to the New World and discover the land which would and still does hold the greatest and freest people on the planet. For this we should commemorate the man and his achievement as something which made the world better and exemplifies the greatest things of Western Civilization.

As always on Columbus Day, Thank You Christopher Columbus.

No comments: