377 Days - Blog #74 why I don't think we need to change the name of Columbus Day

So here we are.  A three day weekend in October.  I always think of this weekend as the peak of New England fall color and the sweetest smell of fall both in the day and that sharp crispness as night falls.  Sometimes (as I hope it to be this year) it is an opportunity for the first fire of the wood stove.  I think of the smell of my mom’s spaghetti sauce filling this house with the last of the year’s tomatoes.  It was the weekend my favorite dog died.  In my adult years, it was a weekend for weddings.  It was Canadian Thanksgiving Italian style and caramel pumpkin bread pudding.  It was and is a merciful day off, bringing with it that promise of more four day weeks and holidays and coziness and food and family and friends and all that is positively glorious about a fall, especially a fall in New England.

But, yeah, I guess it makes people unhappy that we have a day named for an historic tool.

I get that.  I really do.  I think we have a lot of those once taught as heroes, but if you look closer, they were despicable (and yes, that’s probably a more gracious way of expressing inhumanity).  I fully support the arguments about the statement against having this day.  Or how it supports a one sided version of our history.  I also really enjoy what Colbert had to say about this last night.

 

All that said, I think this is one point where our liberal focus is narrowed in on the wrong thing.  Maybe words are a battle to pick.  And I will accept that as a white woman, I have a completely different view of this holiday.  But I think eliminating the name is actually not a solution.  It just pushes the problem under the carpet.

Because…

We’ll stop talking about it.  Or, more like, the part of the country that doesn’t like talking about it except to complain about the PC nature of such things will render this a tied up solution and stop talking about the very real problem of our history.  That in order to be a free and dominant country of white people and capitalism, our ancestors committed genocide. 

Does giving them the name of the holiday repay that?  Does it repair and acknowledge all the racial, economic, and cultural oppression of the last six hundred years?  I mean, look at Martin Luther King Day.  That’s done so much towards retaining the memory and acknowledgment of responsibility of our treatment of men and women brought here by slave ship or denied access to that freedom by Jim Crow or the war on drugs.

We give them a day, like we give people of color or women a month.  And that… makes them equal citizens of our country?  It informs our understanding of the oppression and second class citizenry these populations still face or descend into?  Especially as so many ‘understanding’ humans claim not to see race or need feminism because all they see is the human being – not the complexity of their history and hurt and challenges of every single breathing day.

The name Columbus is like a scar cut across our history.  In some ways, it has healed well and built some resistance against the infection of the hatred and cruelty that created it.  But sometimes it is still tender.  And both its ugliness and residual pain remind us that we are not a perfect nation at all.  That our hubris as the greatest country requires some humility… but also possesses the potential for growth and continued evolution.

To me, the name is a reminder and opportunity for the annual question and discussion of whether or not this is appropriate.  I don’t think of it as a celebration.

Although, truth be told, I don’t celebrate Columbus in my use of the day at all.  I most certainly won’t this year.  Maybe the truth is we don’t actually honor holidays as holy days any longer anyway, so what does it matter?  I mean, aren’t they essentially gimmicks to go out and indulge our materialistic impulses to buy a car or some other unnecessary possession manufactured in a country where the workers are underpaid and exploited so we can have our holiday discount of 20% or 40%?  If that’s the case, then maybe it is more than appropriate that we celebrate an opportunist and exploiter like Christopher Columbus.