Some of you lucky so-and-sos got the day off today. It's Columbus Day, after all. I wasn't so lucky, though. No matter. I still had a productive day and was forced to appreciate Christopher Columbus more than i ever have.
i overheard a person talking about Columbus and saying that he was basically a failure because he couldn't find his way to India. This person, who I see in between 4 and 6 days a week, mentioned that there were so many other explorers, so why celebrate a doofus? She had been complaining about it for about 5 minutes and I couldn't stay silent. Columbus isn't one of my heroes nor do I think he was the best explorer ever (Ibn Battuta anyone?), but he certainly wasn't a doofus.
Me: "Don't you think calling Christopher Columbus a doofus is a little short-sighted?"
Overheard Person: "No."
So that was that. The person clearly thinks just any Joe Sixpack can sail the ocean blue in 1492. Nothing special. No biggy.
Seriously? Sailing the Atlantic, even if you didn't reach your destination, is pretty impressive. Or maybe it's not. Tons of people did it before Columbus, right? A couple of people got there before Columbus, but they pissed off back to their own home country. Columbus isn't the celebrated because he got somewhere: he's famous because he helped prove (along with Vespucci) that this somewhere, where we all live, exists! He helped lead the way to uncovering half of the world! Sure, someone would have stumbled onto the Americas eventually, but Columbus helped people see that there was something over here, blocking them from getting to those precious spices. Columbus did some bad stuff, sure...but so did ALL of the explorers. That's kind of the nature of exploration, isn't it? Nobody back then explored for explorations sake. They did it for money and the people who paid them did it because they trying to gain an advantage over another country. So, I'm blowing a big Internet raspberry at everyone who thinks Columbus was just some doofus who stumbled on something bigger than himself. If that's the case, Alexander Fleming is a doofus, too, right?
In any case, Happy Columbus/Explorer/Indigenous Persons Day.
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1 comment:
What if you think that Columbus simply shouldn't be celebrated because he's a brutal imperialist asshole who practiced genocide and while "discovering" America helped set up the slave trade?
You're point about the difficulty of such a task is well taken, anyone crazy enough to get on a boat in those conditions deserves their propers, but it's nothing I'd go out of my way to honor. I'm more of a Cabeza De Vaca guy myself.
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