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Wed, Nov 25 2009 

Published: October 19, 2009 04:27 pm    print this story   email this story  

Ms.Takes: Columbus is worth celebrating

By Liz Ciancone
Special to the Tribune-Star

Now they’re trashing Christopher Columbus! Schools are taking him out of his historic context and making him a bad guy.

A kindergarten class in Florida talked about “how he was very, very mean, very bossy,” and elementary students in Pennsylvania put Columbus on trial charged with “misrepresenting the Spanish crown and thievery.” He was found guilty as charged.

His “meanness” seems based on his relationship with the indigenous population. It would have been a good time to remind kids that Indians didn’t fare any better when the Puritans hit our shores some 150 years later. Europeans then were convinced that theirs was a higher culture and, besides, they were under religious imperative to convert “savages” to Christianity. So was Columbus.

An associate dean at Texas A&M says Columbus couldn’t have discovered America because people were already here. True, but if you don’t know what’s here isn’t it possible to discover it? As for misrepresenting the Spanish crown, any land occupied by “savages” was fair game. We’re still doing it to our Indians, isolating them on reservations which means on land no one else wants.

Columbus actually accomplished something. Our modern culture seems bent to level the exceptional and make our heroes “just another Joe” like the rest of us. What have our athletes, film stars or rap stars actually accomplished and will it be remembered some 500 or 600 years from now?

I give you the football ace who shot himself in the leg when he tucked a loaded pistol into the waistband of his sweatpants. Or there’s the “OctoMom” who conceived and delivered eight babies. They both may have redeeming characteristics — love their mothers, never mistreat babies or small animals and go to church every Sunday, but what have they really done?

We don’t have the perspective of history to judge them and when history marches on, future generations may never have heard of them. Their moments of fame are merely a blip in time.

Maybe Columbus had his faults, but it took real courage to sail off into the sunset when most of the world thought he was going to fall off the end of a flat earth. I’d say his memory is worth celebrating.

I’m still steamed that we are teaching kids otherwise!

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