I’ve been looking forward to this day all year; Not only because of the day off from school and work but because I get to question it. I get to question Christopher Columbus, our nation’s integrity, and the overall reasons why we celebrate this day. (I don’t literally get to question Christopher Columbus…just his motives...I guess.)

Christopher Columbus was a lost sailor; A lost sailor who aimed for Asia and ended up in the Caribbean. Columbus didn’t “discover” any islands, he discovered people, 8 million people; 8 million people who had “discovered” the island before he did(now the islands of Haiti and Dominican Republic). When he “discovered” that these people were really kind and were interested in forming relationships and trading, he enslaved them. His people enslaved them, raped them, and killed them. Diseases he brought over, became rampant and killed many of them too. The 8 million was cut to 3 million by 1500, which is only 8 years after “1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue”. Fifty years after he arrived, those people were extinct. I don’t know if anyone understands this but, that’s a more ruthless genocide than the Nazi killings in Europe.

I don’t understand why we celebrate all this. In every school in the country kids are taught that Columbus was the “great man who discovered North America”. For a guy that never stepped foot on mainland North America, it seems awfully odd to me. The Vikings had arrived almost 500 years before and there wasn’t genocide to follow. Columbus was Spanish; he had nothing to do with colonizing America, the English became the settlers, it just doesn’t make sense. When we celebrate Columbus Day we are celebrating everything that’s wrong with the world: murder, rape, stealing, slavery, racism, political correctness (he was the one who started calling Natives “Indians”. Little did he know how ridiculous it would become later.), disease, and greed. I don’t know what we were thinking when we made this holiday. Maybe we were just thinking about the day off and just never thought about what and who we were immortalizing. I just don’t understand how we can take a whole day to remember this Hitler-like character. Where’s the integrity America?; Where’s the integrity?

"They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features...They would make fine servants...With fifty men we could subjugate them and make them do whatever we want.” -Christopher Columbus

"We shall take you and your wives, and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault ." - Christopher Columbus

"As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured, the Indians choose and have chosen suicide. Occasionally a hundred have committed mass suicide. The women, exhausted by labor, have shunned conception and childbirth . . . Many, when pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery." -Pedro de Cordoba in a letter to King Ferdinand in 1517

For more articles and discussion visit A Logical Illation [1]