Reader Mike L. sends me this little tale of bullshit:
Less than a week before Massachusetts observes Columbus Day, lawmakers and Native American advocates, some wearing traditional headdresses, asked a legislative committee to replace the holiday with Indigenous Peoples Day.
I’m getting so heartily sick of this nonsense, these attempts to rewrite history (at the expense of settled history, of course), and this glorification of what was essentially a bunch of savages.
Simply put: what did these glorious “indigenous” people ever do for us, for civilization and for the land which would become the United States? Where are their laws, their buildings and monuments, their written (as opposed to oral — i.e. invented) histories?
I’ll tell you where they are: nowhere, because they don’t exist.
So what’s to “honor”, other than to acknowledge that they once existed? Do we have “Neanderthal Day”? Of course we don’t — and do not for one minute think that I’m comparing “indigenous” American peoples to Neanderthals; although now that I think of it, I’m not exactly sure that the comparison isn’t apt, considering that the latter too left no laws, buildings, monuments or history pretty much for the same reasons. We don’t even know that the cave paintings scattered all over Europe and Asia were created by Neanderthals. Cave paintings weren’t much of a legacy, but they were something.
We commemorate achievements and actions precisely because what was done was (duh) memorable and had an effect on the world that followed. I have for example far less issue (in fact, no issue) with, say, Martin Luther King Day than President’s Day (which simply mashed all those wonderful presidents’ individual achievements into some amorphous reason for retail promotions and sales).
We don’t have to commemorate simple existence, we simply have to acknowledge it — for example, in written history (which they didn’t have) — and get on with life.
In terms of world history, what Christopher Columbus achieved was greater than anything achieved by all the Indigenous Peoples’ leaders and chiefs combined, ever. It is an absolute travesty to substitute his day of memory with some (once again) amorphous glorification of a group who collectively were nothing but inhabitants of this continent, whose originality was simply of greater vintage than people like Columbus, and whose legacy was… minimal, to be charitable.
Glorification of that is no more than a participation trophy, another artifact so beloved of the people who want to effect so insidious a change.
Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em all.
