The Day Columbus Plundered America

We celebrate this day. The simple story is Columbus went in search of a better trade route to India and ran into the Americas. What he found surpassed all his expectations- an entire civilization of people untouched by Europeans, locked in a time warp thousands of years behind Europe in industrial and military development- there for the taking and take he did. It’s not a pretty thought. We do our best to suppress the unseemly side of how modern America got started.

The Native Americans greeted Columbus with open arms. He took advantage of their good will, stole everything of value, raped the women and spread diseases that almost annihilated the entire population. He enslaved people to dig for gold; imprisoned natives and took them to Europe as proof of the new world. Each return trip to the Americas increased the pillage and enslavement of the people. It was the beginning of centuries of exploitation that defined the development of the western hemisphere.

When the Native Americans died off all along the coast, we imported enslaved Africans to replace them. The free enterprise system worked like a charm with free labor for hundreds of years. It’s been 517 years since Columbus discovered America. People were enslaved for 373 of those years. It was 517 years before an African American became a leader on this continent, and even today some people still harbor the vestiges of the culture and prejudices that so defined our history.

We don’t talk about what really happened when Columbus discovered America, and most people don’t want to be reminded of it. We either feel guilt for our ancestor’s transgressions or anger because we don’t feel guilty for events that preceded us. In either case Columbus Day is a sorry excuse for celebration, but we get a three-day weekend and the foliage is pretty. Maybe we should rename it to Foliage Day, Fall Day or Harvest Day- anything but Columbus Day.