It’s a first. Columbus, Ohio, will skip celebrations for its namesake.
The move represents a major change for the 14th largest city in America, which up through last year has traditionally shut down operations on Columbus Day.
The city issued a terse news release last week stating Columbus will be open for business Monday, deciding instead to observe Veterans Day on Monday, Nov. 12.
Native Americans and allied groups have long used Columbus Day to elevate issues of concern to them. That includes a peaceful protest of prayers, speeches and traditional singing in 2016 at Columbus City Hall — underneath the statue of the explorer that sits out front — to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline and to urge Ohio to support more renewable energy.
Robin Davis, a spokeswoman for Columbus Mayor Andrew J. Ginther, said that was not part of the city’s decision.
“We wanted to be able to honor our veterans. We thought that was something that was important,” Davis said.
Which is, of course, complete nonsense. Of course that had a lot to do with it.
Many cities have stopped observing the holiday in favor of Indigenous Peoples Day as a way of recognizing victims of colonialism.
The first Columbus Day celebration recorded in the United States was in New York on October 12th, 1792, held to honor Italian-American heritage. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937 proclaimed October 12th to be Columbus Day, a national holiday. In 1971, the holiday date was changed to the second Monday in October.
For various reasons, many places have changed the name of the holiday. Berkeley, California, replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day in 1992 to honor the original inhabitants of the islands where Columbus landed.
In 1989, South Dakota started calling the holiday Native American Day. Alabama celebrates a combination of Columbus Day and American Indian Heritage Day, and Hawaii calls it Discovery Day.
The fact that the city of Columbus is ditching Columbus tells you what you need to know about the likely future of this federal holiday.
The American Indian was the most violent people in the history of our land. More Indians were killed at the hands of other Indians as tribal genocide was the main focus of their lives. In the American Indian culture if a deformed baby was born it would be immediately killed. Their culture had no written language, no numbering system, no roads, no wheel. More Indians died from famine than were killed by white men.
We do not celebrate Columbus Day because Columbus came here, we celebrate it because with him came western culture and with it written language, mathematics, books, symphonies, hospitals, colleges and universities, roads, the wheel, agricultural progress (after the white man’s arrival Indians never again suffered from famine), formal medicine and with it life-saving vaccines, newspapers, printing, written music and above all other things a value for human rights which the Indians never had.
It’s nice to believe little children fantasies but for those of us that know how to read and more importantly don’t mind getting off our rump to actually read, facts are what advances us as a people. Fantasies are what entertain our little children.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/thanksgiving-guilt-trip-how-warlike-were-native-americans-before-europeans-showed-up/