Thoughts on Columbus Day

 

Columbus Day is in the rear view mirror.  I grew up believing that Columbus was a man who spoke truth to power and sailed confidently into the west knowing that he would find the land of Subway, McDonald’s, and Chipotle.  Fighting through hurricane force winds and dealing with the doubts of his men, he finally arrived at a retirement community in South Florida, where he gave all of the native American residents gold plated walkers and promised them, “I shall return!”

Or something like that.

The only problem is that most of we believe about Columbus is false and when you know the truth about this man, it is hard to celebrate a man whose only strength was his bull dog determination to pursue a false idea.

Even blind squirrels find nuts, but we don’t have a national holiday for “Blind Squirrel Day.”

Columbus Wasn’t that Great

There are many websites devoted to unpacking the terribleness of Mr. Columbus.  He wasn’t the only person of his era who believed the earth was round – everyone knew it was round – he was just clueless as to the dimensions of the earth, thinking that it was only 2,400 miles from the Canary Islands to Asia, rather than the more than 10,000 miles it actually was.  Lucky for him the Americas stood in his way or he would never have made it.

More than that, he journeyed not once, but four different times to the Americas over about 15 years of time and never figured out that he wasn’t in the Pacific Ocean – even though many people back in Spain were certain that he was nowhere near Asia. 

It is hard for me to sort out how many of the claims about Mr. Columbus are true.  What is certain is that he enslaved many of the native peoples, using some of them brutally to do hard work on the islands and sending others into slavery in Spain.  Thousands of them died under the lash and more died from illnesses like Small Pox that devastated the local populations.

After his third voyage, Christopher Columbus was removed as governor in the New World by King Ferdinand and was sent home in chains.  While he was eventually released from prison, it seems clear that he was not a good governor and was removed for a mixture of reasons, including the brutality with which he treated the Spanish colonists and general mismanagement.

In fact, for the next one hundred years, he was seldom mentioned in histories of the Age of Discovery.  America was named after a different man -- Amerigo Vespucci -- and Columbus faded into the background of history.

Why do we celebrate Columbus Day?

Honestly, I am not totally sure.  It is a bankers holiday, which means that most of us don’t even contemplate not going to work.  The only way I know that Columbus Day has been and gone is that there is less junk mail in my mail box than usual.  On the other hand, 26 states don’t have any sort of holiday on the second Monday in October and only 16 states still recognize this day as Columbus Day.

Those states that still celebrate this day are renaming this holiday to Indigenous Peoples Day.  So far, seventeen have done so, but I’m guessing that more will follow suit down the road.  I think this is totally reasonable – it isn’t as though Columbus discovered some scientific breakthrough – in point of fact, there were already people in the Americas for centuries before he ever showed up.

More than anything else, this day speaks to me of the danger of elevating individuals based on the stories that have been spun about them.  We want to believe that men like Columbus, Jefferson, and Washington were great men, that the United States was blessed by the Almighty from the beginning.

The problem is that these people were human and they were fallible.  Whether or not they deserve statues is beyond me (I don’t think Columbus does), but the issue that we have is that when we elevate humans to god-like status, we feel obligated to defend them, even to minimizing or refusing to admit their flaws.

I think it was just this sort of thing that the Apostle Paul was addressing when he told the Corinthians, “Follow me as I follow Christ.”  (I Cor. 11:1)  Paul wanted no statues, he only wanted people to follow the true leader.

The only one that we should deify – the only one who is truly worthy of statues is Jesus Christ.  He is the only one who did not have feet of clay.  Everyone else – generals, athletes, and even preachers -- have flaws that show up under the magnifying glass (some with out it).