Today's Today

"Let us, in the name of The Holy Trinity, go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."  

--Christopher Columbus

hat tip = @JohnFugelsang (the quote is via Howard Zinn - and it may be apocryphal)

From Indian Country Today:

On the second Monday of October each year, Native Americans cringe at the thought of honoring a man who committed atrocities against Indigenous Peoples.

Columbus Day was conceived by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic Fraternal organization, in the 1930s because they wanted a Catholic hero. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the day into law as a federal holiday in 1937, the rest has been history.

In an attempt to further thwart the celebration of this “holiday,” we at ICTMN have outlined eight misnomers and bloody, greedy, sexually perverse and horrendous atrocities committed by Columbus and his men.

As usual, 2 things: 

First, Columbus was a man of his times. Those times could be dispassionately brutal and uncaring, so they produced people who often behaved as compassionless brutes.

Second, we apply a very liberal amount of hagiographic cleanser to the stories, and hey look - a brand new gold-plated sparkling American hero.

I have no problem celebrating all the really great things we want this country to be and to stand for and to characterize for the rest of the world to emulate, but when we learn that the guy who's supposed to embody all that awesomely awesome awesomeness was a complete asshole by every modern standard (standards we claim to hold dear) - we gotta make some changes.