Sinking Columbus Day

We celebrate some of the dumbest holidays. The one I hate most was Monday. In case you didn't realize, Monday was Columbus Day, which is the worst holiday. But then again, there's a lot of competition for that honor. \nThe most annoying ones aren't even official. Valentine's Day is a dumb one. It's supposedly honoring a saint that no one knows anything about. But Sweetest Day is even worse -- we might as well call it Valentine's Day II. And then there's Groundhog Day. A groundhog pops out of a hole, and if it's really cold, he'll go back into hibernation. It has nothing to do with a shadow. Maybe next year we should change it to Groundhog Hibernation Day and get the bears in on the action. And don't forget about Parent's Day in July. We already have a Mother's Day and a Father's Day. At least change it to Grandparent's Day. Oh wait, that already exists.\nAnd then there are those holidays that have some significant meaning but people just use them as an excuse to do something completely unrelated. These include Christmas, Easter and St. Patrick's Day. \nLast year Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called for a boycott of Columbus Day, saying Christopher Columbus was "worse than Hitler." Monday's celebration of Columbus Day was stupid, just like every year. It commemorates a man who found a whole new part of the world. \nOh wait -- no he didn't. It's drilled into our heads that Columbus discovered the Americas. Some people still think he discovered North America, but all he found were some islands in the Caribbean. There are historians who have found evidence that the Vikings landed in Canada way before Columbus' voyages. Others say the Portuguese landed in North America almost 30 years before Columbus. So the one good thing we credit him with might not even be true. \nChavez also characterized Columbus as "the spearhead of the biggest invasion and genocide ever seen in the history of humanity." And he's right. He killed and enslaved natives out of a desire for gold. You can blame the Portuguese for African enslavement, and you can blame Columbus for American Indian enslavement. He's the father of American Indian oppression. \nWith all his violent acts and false discoveries, we still honor him with a holiday on the second Monday of October. Many Latin American countries threw out the holiday. In Mexico City there's a statue of Columbus that's vandalized on that day every year. Last Saturday in Denver, a protest group made up of 600 American Indians stood in the way of a Columbus Day parade, according to www.CNN.com. Their signs called Columbus a savage and a racist.\nOur government and the governments of other countries that celebrate Columbus Day need to seriously rethink this holiday because it's pissing off a lot of people. By keeping the holiday alive, we're showing that our ways of thinking haven't changed in hundreds of years. Everything we read in school is written from the European point of view, and that's why Columbus is considered a hero. If a country writes the book, it'll never consider any of its own faults; it'll just try to justify them. If our books had both sides of the story, we would've realized in middle school that he's no hero. Only recently have historians been researching the point of view of the natives, but it's mostly college students that gain the advantage of this perspective. Our ways of thinking need to change. Columbus' grand "discovery" isn't true, and even if it were, his crimes against humanity would hugely overshadow it.\nThis holiday has been around for so long that no one even cares about its meaning anymore. The problem is that people hate change and are afraid to change the way they perceive their world. Hey, any excuse to have a parade!