happy columbus day, ilx!

The Sopranos told me so.

Unless of course you are of native American extraction

I've got some Native American blood in me and I'm celebrating Columbus Day, mainly because it's a day off work, sure, but also because I think it's kinda cool how the Americas ended up joining the rest of the world because of the exploring Columbus and the other explorers (e.g. Vasco de Gama) did of this "New World". Although I think that had no exploring been done of the Americas, I think I would've ended up a Spaniard, so....

Yay for opportunities for goofing off at work! ;)

(Now I must depart for, um, errand running. And bedroom organization. And other things that need to be caught up on.)

day off, screw you Columbus. off to see Facebook movie.

Could really use the day off today.

Tbh I wish I had this whole week off.

Even one day would be nice, though.

Agreed. I'm still exhausted from my sister's wedding this weekend.

hung over from Canadian thanksgiving partying yesterday. Drinking San Pellegrino with Emergen-c mixed innit.

hope y'all are having a nice holiday!

people still get columbus day off?

They all must work at banks or the post office.

happy day off for special american reasons!

i would like to also say happy canadian thanksgiving but can't find the thread for some reason and the search is just frustrating me :(

I haven't done shit for two weeks since getting back from vacation, even though there's been a stack of work on my desk, so, uh, I guess I better not take today off as well.

Fuck, forgot all about the parking meters being free. It's supposed to rain, too.

http://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/columbo-1.jpg

It's kind of hard to overlook CC's penchant for enslaving the natives and working them to death, tbh.

Not to mention all the rape that went on around him and which he condoned for its "demoralizing"* effect.

*dehumanizing

It's only a holiday because of pressure from the Italian-American community, IIRC.

happy columbus day, ilx

Word
Taking the day and chilling in Central Park for a bit and then out to wburg for beers

Motherfuckers in my facebook feed be columbusing columbusing every year.

Parking meters aren't actually free on Columbus Day. Learned that one the hard way.

Guinea Ts come out and play-ay

Maybe just because I had a middle school teacher who taught us about the "real" Columbus circa 1993 I get tired of the enlightened white person fb status updates, but ultimately I know that it's better that those status updates happen than that they don't.

When the Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded in 1629, its original seal showed a Native American saying — this seems made up, but isn’t — “Come Over and Help Us.” Andrew Jackson, in his famous address to Congress celebrating the Indian Removal Act of 1830, spoke of “the benevolent policy of the Government … toward the red man,” which was “not only liberal, but generous.” Similarly, Teddy Roosevelt wrote “no other conquering and colonizing nation has ever treated the original savage owners of the soil with such generosity as has the United States.” Later the Vietnamese become the beneficiaries of our goodwill; as U.S. News and World Report put it in 1966, “What the United States is doing in Vietnam is the most significant example of philanthropy extended by one people to another that we have witnessed in our times.”

https://theintercept.com/2015/10/12/columbus-day-is-the-most-important-day-of-every-year/

There's no need to worship or commemorate Columbus as a person, and certainly no need to celebrate his "discovery" of something that millions of people were already experiencing firsthand.

But the ongoing presence of Europeans in what we now call the Americas, and the importation of American things/people/ideas into the rest of the world? That's a pretty significant development in human history, with enormous consequences. (It used to be cutely called the "Columbian Exchange" as if it were a voluntary transaction among equals.)

You can certainly mourn how devastating it was (and I do). You can certainly wish it played out differently (and I do). But it profoundly changed the world we now inhabit. None of us would exist without it, and those that did exist would inhabit a profoundly different world. Maybe if it hadn't been Columbus in 1492 it would have been some other dude in some other year; I don't know and no one can ever know. But this is the sequence of events we've inherited.

I don't think it's contradictory to simultaneously think Columbus was an asshole, and yet still want to spend some time contemplating this sequence of events with some seriousness, regardless of what you call it.