Columbus Day: A National Holiday

Whether you call it Columbus Day or Indigenous People’s Day, one thing is for sure — the holiday generates a sea of debate that could capsize even the Santa Maria. While numerous textbooks present Christopher Columbus as the popular pioneer who found America, history has painted a significantly more muddled picture. Regardless of whether you were to neglect the not really minor truth that a huge number of individuals were at that point living in North America in 1492, the truth of the matter is that Columbus never set foot on our shores. Indeed, October 12 denotes the day of his appearance to the Bahamas. While he reached the shorelines of what today are Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, just as investigate the Central and South American coasts, he never spread out a Spanish banner in North America (Leif Eriksson was the first European believed to have sailed to North America, having reached Canada 500 years before Columbus set sail to the west.)

Therefore, In my personal opinion I do not think that Columbus is a hero. He seems more like a villain to me. I state this because no matter how much I look at his accomplishments and pros as a person, the negative outcomes and results he left in the world are to a point in which I cannot tolerate. He is a disgusting person, through my eyes, but I still understand why people can support him, hundreds of years later, even if I do not agree myself. In no ways or matters can I substantially list a reason that I would support him, because in my opinion he did not even do that much (considering he didn't even discover the Americas // that was Amerigo Vespucci and Vikings like Leif Eriksson), he just brought more popularity into traveling the world and discovering what hasn’t been brought to European’s attention. Not only that, but with the amount of lives he took and claimed, no finding of Europe would ever recall to be that critical to sacrifice that many innocent bodies and souls.

Further on, many already believed that the world was round, and several other explorers remarkably estimated so just mathematically or scientifically so technically the only thing he did was to be brave and sail a ship, to discover already existing and claimed land, and claim it as “his own” findings of the “Indians”.

As I was listening to a broadcasting audio about this topic, I found a couple points that are worth sharing for this question. “I think there should be two days– a Columbus Day and an Indigenous Peoples Day,” Palen said. “I don’t think changing the name of one to the other is necessarily what we need to do.” When all is said and done, Bouda thinks the United States should just change the title to “American’s Day”. He believes there are so many historical figures involved in the country’s development to its current state that it is unfair to just focus on one.

“There is a lot of discussions about whether Columbus is a hero or a villain. While Columbus is guilty of many atrocities, he set in motion something that could not be stopped,” Bouda said. “There were many other European explorers who were guilty of a lot worse than what Columbus did, and they hardly get any attention paid to their violation of human and natural rights during their time. I don’t think Columbus deserves all of the blame.”

I personally think that this viewpoint of the whole story, the speaker, Bouda, does have some points. For example, he mentioned that Columbus was not the only explorer at the time who committed to such cruelty and terrible actions, but he was the one who got showcased about it hundreds of years later. I still do think that he is not a good person, but the speaker I listened to changed my mindset towards how I viewed him. Not a fan, but I can understand how others can see him positively, even if I do not agree with it myself.