On Monday Oct. 9, we celebrated Christopher Columbus with a national holiday in his honor. Honor, however, is least deserved by this man if you take a closer look at his life. His expeditions that we learned all learned about as kids were full of greed and abuse. It greatly damaged an entire community of people in the process of creating the “land of the free.” It’s time to get woke and learn about the truth of how this nation came to be.
Why Christopher Columbus Sucks:
- He took advantage of the giving nature of indigenous people. Let me start by saying that the land that Christopher Columbus came to wasn’t even North America, but different islands in the Caribbean. When arriving on this land, he reported back to Spain that he couldn’t believe how different their culture was from the Europeans. They had little connection to their earthly possessions and were immediately very giving to Columbus and his crew. When he saw this, greed took over, and he saw this as an opportunity to exploit these people and claim their land as his own.
- He seized, enslaved, and killed thousands of these people, not once, but twice. In his first voyage, Columbus attempted to bring back 1,150 “specimens,” as he called them, to Spain to show off his “discovery.” All the people he brought onto his ship died before making it back to Spain. So he set back out to another island to capture more native people. It was on this island that he discovered he could exploit this land for gold, and, in the process, rape, slaughter, and burn the civilization.
- He lied about it all. In his reports back to Spain, he explained that the indigenous people (who, by the way, he thought were all Indian! That’s right, he thought he made it to India!) were supportive of his voyages and no one objected to his actions. Although they were giving at first, being tortured, raped, captured, and eventually killed was not a mutual decision of the indigenous people and Columbus. And he knew that. His disgusting betrayal of innocent people was praised and honored by the people of Europe, and still hundreds of years later, by people in the U.S.
You may have heard some people calling this past Monday “Indigenous Peoples Day.” This is to combat the deceitfulness of Columbus’s legacy and celebrate the culture of these people. Although a lot of it has been wiped out, it remains a strong part of the diversity of the U.S. today. I have nothing but respect for those who take pride in their heritage as Indigenous people, even though it’s been stomped on since the “founding” of this nation.
PC: someecards.com