Worst Holiday Ever

 Most years, I link to Adam Conover ruining Columbus, so here you go. A few years back, I was presenting at a conference in Baltimore, and when I got off the highway I discovered that the entire city was basically shut down for a Columbus Day parade. It took me an hour and a half to get to the hotel and I almost missed my presentation. The parade consisted mostly of high school marching bands, which in Baltimore means that it consisted most of African American kids.

 

Columbus is the last person on earth who African Americans should be marching to celebrate, as I expect I don't have to tell you. The entire story about Columbus that is told to schoolchildren is a lie. He did not have the astonishing insight that the earth is round and therefore you could get to Asia from Europe by sailing west. Everybody -- or at least, all mariners -- already knew that the earth was spherical. The ancient Greeks knew that and Erathtosthenes accurately calculated its circumference in 240 BC. Therefore, mariners presumed that if they sailed west, they would run out of food and water and die before they got to Asia. Columbus, however, was an idiot and due to an arithmetic error he thought the earth was only 2/3 its actual size. Had he not by complete accident run into the Caribbean islands, he would indeed have died of thirst.

 

He thought he had happened on the islands southeast of China until the day he died. He never set foot in North America and he was unaware of its existence. He presumed there was a large land mass to his north and west, and that it was China. He enslaved and exterminated the people of the islands he had blundered onto. Once the indigenous people were mostly gone, the Spanish imported slaves from Africa to grow sugar cane, and that is Columbus's legacy. 

 

The reason we have a major holiday on this date is because Italian Americans campaigned for a holiday in their honor and Columbus is what they came up with. He was not in fact Italian. In his day, Italy did not exist, and he spoke Ligurian. He sailed for Spain. But regardless, he is not someone Italian Americans should be proud of. I also do not see why we should have a federal holiday specifically honoring Italian Americans anyway. Saint Patrick's Day is not a holiday, except in Boston -- actually it's the day after so people can recover from their hangovers. There is no holiday celebrating the English, the Greeks, the Germans, the Polish, the Chinese, the Japanese or anybody else of any specific ethnicity. 

 

So can we please call it something else?