Daily Verse | Matthew 23:15
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.”
Tuesday’s Reading: Matthew 26-28
Tuesday and it completely slipped my mind that yesterday was Columbus Day Indigenous People’s Day. Which is funny because for years my birthday was on Columbus Day Indigenous People’s Day until it got codified as the second Monday of October in 1971. I kinda’ liked sharing my birthday with good ol’ Columbus.
But Columbus has fallen out of favor in recent years because of racism and colonization and every manner of evil today’s wokesters project back into the mists of time. I don’t have the bandwidth to get into the nitty-gritty of why the charges against Columbus are, at best, half-truths, but I can say that in his time and context, his highest priority was converting the natives to Christianity and that he was under orders to treat the natives “very well and lovingly” and to “honor them much.”
What really bothers me is the effort to erase America’s history and traditions and, worse yet, to erase them based on something less than the truth. Progressives have been attacking Columbus Day for years and over the last two, they’ve succeeded in getting Indigenous People’s Day on the calendar on the same day as the traditional Columbus Day.
So they’ve diluted Columbus Day and created tension in society by making people choose what they’ll spend the day celebrating. Next step will be getting rid of Columbus Day because you can’t have both on the same day — and then Columbus Day will be gone forever, just like Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays.
It’s not so much that I object to observing a day for “indigenous people.” Fine, have a day for that. What I object to is the demonization of Columbus and, more to the point, a holiday that has been an American tradition for 85 years.
For me, it’s the same as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I have no problem recognizing the great man and his work on civil rights for black Americans. What I have a problem with is that while we observe a day dedicated to the memory of a specific man, Dr. King, we have also diminished the memories of other, arguably more important men to the history of these United States — namely, the first president and the father of our country, George Washington, and perhaps the greatest president of all, Abraham Lincoln.
I remember getting Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays off from school in February every year. Now all of our presidents are ‘celebrated’ in an anonymous President’s Day on Washington’s birthday. And our calendar is filled with ridiculous observances for days and months because this and that group needs their fifteen minutes of fame.
It all makes a mockery of the weight that observances used to have among us.
All of this is happening in an era when statues of American historical figures important to our heritage are being torn down in acts of reactionary violence in an effort to destroy the foundations of our collective memory. Any country that destroys its own history is committing cultural suicide.
It’s all of a piece with what I wrote yesterday and previous posts about critical theory. It does nothing but destroy, with the objective being the complete humiliation and overthrow of the country.