Christopher Columbus was a lost sadist. There shouldn’t be a holiday in his name

*This debate comes around every year, and each year it spirals with more intensity. I’ve scoured the internet and there’s nothing new being said on the matter. Many cities and some states have changes the name from Columbus Day to Indignous Poeple’s Day. So I’d like to know what you think. Columbus Day or Indigenous People’s Day? VL

By James Nevius, The Guardian

The second Monday in October has been designated an American federal holiday in Christopher Columbus’s honor since 1937. To most people in the United States, this commemoration of his 1492 landing in the Bahamas no longer has much meaning – many Americans outside of large Italian American communities are only dimly aware that it’s an official holiday. Many people don’t even get the day off work, instead trading Columbus Day for the day after Thanksgiving.

The holiday’s popularity has been waning for some time. In cities like Seattle and Minneapolis, it has been already been renamed Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a reminder that Columbus’s voyages set off a chain of events that wreaked havoc on native populations in the New World. It’s time to make that piecemeal commemoration official: stop celebrating Columbus and start celebrating the native cultures he began the process of displacing.

For generations, school children learned to recite, “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue”. They then learned the story of the brave explorer who navigated into uncharted territory with sailors who were frightened of falling off the edge of a flat earth. That tale, much of it created by Washington Irving (the man who gave us The Legend of Sleepy Hollow), is bunk. Mariners knew full well the earth was round, including Columbus and his crew. Columbus just thought the circumference of the earth was thousands of miles smaller, and thus that the islands of the Caribbean were the East Indies. Our holiday celebrates a man who was lost.

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