The Oatmeal is a humor site that has given the hoi polloi such memorable articles like How to Use a Semicolon , My Dog, the Paradox, and my personal favorite, 10 Words You Need to Stop Misspelling. Earlier this week, the individuals behind those posts also shared a comical tirade against Christopher Columbus. Feel free to read it if you like, but anyone with more than a passing interest in history probably knows most of what the post contains.
Columbus is presented as a bumbling, greed-fueled, genocidal madman. There's some historical basis for such a claim and the post's point about rejecting Columbus's achievement is insightful, if not a bit too tongue-in-cheek for such a heavy topic. Ultimately, the idea is offered that we shouldn't celebrate Columbus Day if it's to honor the dead mariner.
Growing up, the need for such a holiday was tied to the presentation of Columbus as a courageous hero of human exploration. Even if it's true that intelligent people thought the world was round or that Columbus wasn't the first European to land in the Americas, the boldness of such a gambit evokes thoughts of humanity's propensity to abandon fear in search of answers from the unknown.
Every semester when teaching a certain essay unit, I ask students to describe what exploration means. Some point to Mars and our efforts there as a reasonable definition, while others point to psychonauts exploring the innerspace of human consciousness, where they arrive at new truths and thus see the world anew. Exploration motivates people to seek out new medicine to fight diseases, while also motivating others to break social barriers and unjust laws. Columbus Day could celebrate all of those human characteristics, but it seems like a stretch to say that.
Like it does most things, new knowledge disabused me of lionizing Columbus. Even if we give Columbus credit for the brave journey, there's simply far too much evidence that his ethics were questionable, at best. Even if we somehow discount the evidence against him as the jealousy of rivals, Columbus's arrival heralded a new era of conquest, exploitation, greed, and genocide. European kingdoms became bloated transoceanic empires by gorging themselves on gold, raw materials, and the labor of slaves cruelly ripped from West Africa and the Americas. Columbus's arrival opened the door to a global imbalance of power that still threatens the future of humanity.
Simply put, the effects of Columbus's discovery are too tragic and destructive to warrant celebration. Now, the folks over at The Oatmeal proposed using a contemporary of Columbus as the new central figure of the holiday. While Las Casas is a better figure to promote, I wonder why we need to even elevate a benevolent, White European at all in this context.
The discovery and subjugation of the New World is a chapter in Western Civilization that is an excellent lesson in our industry and cruelty. Neither can be separated from the other and though I'm a fortunate inheritor of certain advantages derived from the settlement of the New World, any holiday that ignores the death and suffering of millions, just to honor their conquerors, seems unworthy of remembrance.
If the holiday is meant to celebrate humanity's burning desire to explore, then why attach it to any one specific individual? Why not attach it to an achievement that hasn't yet been sullied by genocide or cultural extermination? I've wondered this for quite some time and the solution I've come up with, at least for Americans, is extraordinarily obvious.
We should celebrate Lunar Landing Day instead of Columbus Day.
There's still a few kinks to work out with the memory rhyme.
If Congress ever returns to work, it seems simple enough to promote a bill than swaps one federal holiday for another. Every year in the United States, on July 21st, we could celebrate humanity's first steps onto another celestial body. It possesses all the same characteristics as Columbus's voyage, but to an even greater degree.
The holiday could be used as a celebration of STEM-based subject matter or humanity's ever-widening body of knowledge of the physical universe. Beyond that, it's one American achievement not explicitly tainted by war, suffering, or assassination. It's an achievement that no other nation can claim, so why not celebrate something positive our technology has accomplished?
Even more, Lunar Landing Day celebrates the limitless potential of humanity. Our competitiveness might have driven the moonshot, but the holiday's focus would be on how we can motivate each other to achieve greater things, to believe in a greater future, and to ponder what only a select few humans have been able to behold: that our world is bound together as a whole, not as an assemblage of distinct parts.
One family photo that wasn't ruined by your obnoxious, blond little brother.
Our fate, as a species, is tied to our understanding of our rarity and diversity. There aren't any other known intelligent civilizations to compare ourselves against. There's only us and we only have this small, water-covered planet to share amongst ourselves.
Petty differences and politically-motivated military conflicts tell a large part of humanity's story to this point, but we're also a species that strives towards greater ideas. We're incredibly slow at enacting such ideas, but our vision of a better, more harmonious world is only limited by the pessimism of those clinging to the power structures of the past. Our imagination and capacity to courageously explore know no boundaries.
Columbus Day is burdened by the effects of the conquest of the New World. It's a holiday whose time has passed and whose namesake is increasingly unworthy of lionization. It's also a holiday that overlooks the suffering of millions to honor the achievements of the few. It's time to celebrate a new holiday.
Lunar Landing Day isn't specifically designed to celebrate Neil Armstrong, NASA, or the American empire. It's designed to celebrate the bravery of human exploration, the courage of seeking knowledge from the unknown, and the grand possibilities that our shared future contains. It's a time to ponder what we're doing to make our world better, more unified, and more aware of our shared destiny.
So today, when someone sarcastically wishes you a happy Columbus Day or lays claim to your coffee in the spirit of Columbus Day, laugh off their bad sense of humor and tell them it's time to stick Columbus Day's flag right up their... Better yet, just tell them that it's time to swap in a new federal holiday.
Maybe next year, on July 21st, we'll be able to look up at the moon on a sultry July evening and see a reminder of humanity's potential, shining down on us and inspiring greatness. Maybe we'll have a few beers and try to fire a bottle rocket at it. Either way, it sounds a hell of a lot better than feigning interest in an unworthy, depressing holiday in the middle of October.
If memory serves, Columbus Day was first boosted by Italian Americans, and was specifically intended to honor an Italian American "hero." It could just as easily be Joe DiMaggio or Frank Sinatra day--or, if we want to preserve the Great Explorer notion, Enrico Fermi Day!
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