Columbus Day, 2011

After lunch on Monday, my dog and I took our daily walk down the lane to get the mail. She went off to check the groundhog holes in the woods by the pond. I continued down the lane to the mailbox. I crossed the road and opened the mailbox. Empty. Not even my weekly invitation to subscribe to Dish Network or Direct TV. Then I remembered. No mail delivery today. It’s Columbus Day!

On my walk back to the house, empty handed, I thought about what a ridiculous holiday Columbus Day is. Five hundred nineteen years ago, more than half a millennium, Columbus and his little band landed in India. Well not quite. Instead they had discovered a new world! Well not quite. To his credit they had embarked on a voyage into the unknown. There was some fear that they might sail off the edge of the world in the night and be lost forever. But there have been a lot of other courageous explorations in history that are not honored by a special holiday…Is Columbus the best example we can find in the last five hundred years?

The dark side of his landing was the beginning of the extermination of the native people already living here that would last for…five hundred years. Is that part of the celebration too?

My first thought was that Columbus Day was an anachronism, a holiday from another era that should be discarded. After all, most of us don’t even think about Columbus Day, until we check our mailboxes. My second thought was to keep it, with the same name, as a day to reflect on our current national actions. To ask ourselves whether the things we do that are so courageous today are in fact cruel, exploitative, demeaning, destructive to other cultures and worldviews…and maybe even to ourselves.

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