columbus day
Members and allies of the Indigenous Peoples’ Day Committee celebrate on the front steps of Rochester City Hall with the Haudenosaunee Hiawatha Belt flag after the Rochester City Council unanimously passed a resolution to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day on June 14, 2022. Courtesy/Indigenous Peoples’ Day Committee
Those inside Rochester, N.Y.’s city hall let out a roaring round of applause after nine council members unanimously approved a resolution to end its celebration of Columbus Day and replace it with a commemoration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day each October.
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This nation needs to make a choice. Does it continue to honor a man whose claim of “discovery” opened the door for centuries of injustice? Or does it openly teach that history, mourn those atrocities, and commit itself to ensuring that it does not happen again?
In our own time the "jobs" rhetoric from both the right and the left ignores the power grabs and power differentials that led to the hemorrhaging of American jobs in the first place. The simple truth is that multinational corporations could make more money for their shareholders by outsourcing jobs to third-world countries so that is what they did.
This was not a moral dilemma for CEOs; it was a "sound business decision." And the gospel according to free-market capitalism (the USA's true religion) preaches that what is good for American business is good for America.
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As an explorer, Columbus was not the first to reach the Western Hemisphere. Native Americans had been here for 10,000-20,000 years, and Vikings and Chinese are among those others who hold prior claims. Even after four attempts, Columbus never realized his goal of finding a western ocean route to Asia. As a “founding father type figure” he never set foot in what is now considered America but landed in the present day Bahamas, Cuba, and Haiti.
As a Christian example he enacted terrible cruelties to friendly natives: assuming unlawful rights of authority; robbing and subjugating whole nations of their freedom and entire capital; allowing his men to rape, murder and pillage at will; and deliberately leading the way for the genocide of millions, considered by many to be the worst demographic catastrophe in recorded history.
So why do Americans celebrate Columbus Day?