Why celebrate Columbus Day?
Many peoples are angry at the mere mention of Christopher Columbus as a hero or someone to be admired. He is portrayed as an exploiter, murderer, gold digger and worse by many of the peoples still alive today that were native to North America at the time of his arrival in 1492.
Still, Columbus should be celebrated because had both the courage to launch such a daunting voyage and the smarts to monetize the New World once he landed upon it. Many of us have the same opportunities and experiences that billionaires and other mega successful people do, but only a very few are smart enough to recognize them when they come along. It is in this that Columbus stands alone and unique among the early explorers. Most of the early explorers simply came the New World, dropped a flag or made some markings and left. Columbus however, recognized the opportunity and seized it.
Early explorers arrived in the New World from several other peoples before Christopher Columbus ever did. Some of these we know of, others we can never know their names. Yet, they did little more than arrive on the shores of the Western continents and leave. Some may have established an outpost or two but either failed to explore further, or failed to record it. Either way, those early pre-Columbus explorers also failed to recognize the potential wealth and enormity of scale that Columbus did.
Yes, Columbus exposed native peoples of the Americas to many atrocities, but you cannot apply ethics of 2012 to people of 1492. Our morals and standards will be very different than people of 2512 as well. Perhaps in 2512 they will be more aggressive, or perhaps they will be a passionate people– either way, it would be impossible for a man of today to have the moral outlook or education of someone that 500 years of distance separates, either forward or back.
And so, Happy Columbus Day, for without his foresight, in all likelihood America as we know it would not exist, and might never have been given birth to the enlightened people that inhabit it today.
It is in this we celebrate, not the exploits or crimes of a single man, but of the day when our roots as Americans began, the day that the future took root in the past and from which the blossom of America bore its first fruit.
Without Columbus there would have been no Jamestown. Without Jamestown there would have been no Plymouth. Without Plymouth there would have been no Boston, Philadelphia or New York. There would have been no United States to feed the world, provide a beacon of hope to the peoples oppressed by the feudal tyrannical kings, no arsenal of freedom to defeat the scourge of Nazism, no Reagan to break the back of the Soviet Union and widespread communism.
Maybe that’s why a lot of leftists support groups who oppose the holiday and teach schoolchildren to hate him, rather than recognize him. But leftists should consider this: without Christopher Columbus there would have been no enlightened Americans who have the freedom of speech and thought to pass judgment on him today.
Happy Columbus Day.
