Let’s take back Columbus Day — VOICES for REASON

At Brown University, the faculty voted earlier this year to ditch Columbus Day in favor of “Fall Weekend.” In years past, Berkeley, California made a similar move to “Indigenous Peoples Day,” and South Dakota now marks “Native American Day.” Even where the Columbus name has been kept, virtually all enthusiasm for celebrating the holiday has disappeared.

Why does an embarrassed, guilty silence descend on the nation each Columbus Day? Because people don’t know how to celebrate the blossoming of Western civilization over the past five centuries without seeming to rejoice in the misery of American Indians. Modern historians have distorted the facts, finding fault with Columbus, America, and Western civilization for evils and tragedies that they did not create—while extolling mysticism and tribalism, which actually are the causes of history’s darkest chapters.

It was Western philosophers, scientists, statesmen and businessmen who gave mankind the first moral and practical alternatives to such age-old scourges as slavery, racism, warfare, and disease. I’m talking about men like Aristotle, Newton, Locke, Pasteur, and Rockefeller. I’m talking about the scientific method (including medical research), individualism (including the concept of individual rights), and capitalism—all of which combined to liberate humanity from the miserable, stagnant poverty suffered by Indians in the Stone Age, and Europe in the Dark Ages.

By effectively abandoning Columbus Day, we’ve cheated ourselves out of an opportunity to celebrate the core values of Western civilization: reason and individualism. No nation on earth is more entitled to celebrate those values than the United States of America, which is history’s shining example of their life-serving power. It’s time to take back Columbus Day, to reclaim it as a patriotic holiday, an occasion for Americans to honor the great explorer who wrote the first chapter in our nation’s illustrious history.

I’ll be speaking on this topic next week (October 12, 13, and 15) at the Universities of Virginia, Maryland, and Texas; see this link for details. Those interested in even more details may want to consult my book, The Enemies of Christopher Columbus.

Image: Wikimedia Commons