Happy North American Genocide Day

I just wanted to take this opportunity to wish everyone a wonderful Columbus Day, 2013.  As if it won't be enchanted enough with all of the political wrangling going on in Washington, D.C., we have arrived at another 2nd Monday in October when we can pause and reflect on the exploits of a truly ambitious, brave, and daring, albeit not-so-nice man.  It's not that I don't appreciate the significance of America's discovery and the change that it brought to civilization and the trajectory of the entire world, but I just feel that Columbus might not belong in among other national holidays such as President's Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.  Just seems like we might have some more respectable people and events to honor, that's all.  Let's take a quick look at Columbus.

Christopher Columbus, or Cristoforo Colombo was an Italian voyager who set sail to locate an accessible trade route to the East Indies essentially under contract from the Catholic Monarchs of Spain.  Columbus was a businessman, renowned as ambitious and energetic.  He wasn't entirely literate or even mathematically inclined either.  The greatest free maybe-factually-accurate news source in the world, Wikipedia, puts it this way, when describing his reasoning for the voyage and his expectations of finding the East Indies so handily:

"Where Columbus did differ from the view accepted by scholars in his day was in his estimate of the westward distance from Europe to Asia. Columbus's ideas in this regard were based on three factors: his low estimate of the size of the Earth, his high estimate of the size of the Eurasian landmass, and his belief that Japan and other inhabited islands lay far to the east of the coast of China.^{[citation needed]} In all three of these issues Columbus was both wrong and at odds with the scholarly consensus of his day"

It's not that Columbus miscalculated, was overly naive, or even that he was wrong that gets me.  It's that he was wrong in every possible way, and he was too arrogant to listen to anyone else.  This guy was totally full of himself.  

Well, we all know the bulk of the story, and how Columbus landed in mezzoamerica. (He wasn't the first explorer to find the continent even, but was following Leif Ericson's conquest by nearly 500 years)  Until his death, and after untold numbers of people told him where he had landed, Columbus insisted on calling the place where he had landed the East Indies, and the inhabitants Indians, indignant and proud.  Columbus embarked upon 4 long voyages of these new lands, claiming every island, straight, and harbor for the Spanish Crown.  He then was appointed governor of Hispaniola for almost 20 years thereafter.  

During his governorship, it was estimated that Columbus and his raiding henchmen reduced populations of millions to just thousands in mines and pits, starving and squeezing every drop of energy from their bodies.  A woman accused Columbus of a lowly birth to be paraded naked in dusty streets with her tongue cut out.  Men who filched meager rations of corn had ears and noses cut off and they were sold into slavery.  Columbus' ruthless ways were renowned, and along with abject mutilation and starvation, Columbus and his troops brought debilitating disease and despair to once proud civilizations.  In the end, even the Spanish crown got tired of Columbus because he couldn't get along with any of the other governors of the new lands, and fired him from the job.  

Thousands upon thousands of children died under Columbus' rule, either from starvation because their mothers couldn't produce milk, or because of harsh treatment, or even because, in their desperation, some parents would kill their children to save them the agony of such a life.  In 14 years, an estimated 3,000,000 native inhabitants were killed by Columbus, which was staggering to the very persons visiting from Europe to see the progress of the new land.  Put into perspective, Columbus, with about 300 men and rudimentary, primitive weapons, did at least half as much killing as Hitler and his death camps and thousands of soldiers in WWII.  It is virtually unbelievable.  Along with their brutality, Columbus and his men brought Smallpox and Syphilis.  And in the end, we have only estimates, but can never be sure of the extent of this brutality that Columbus imposed upon his 'new world.'  

I'm just saying, seems we should think of a better namesake for this Holiday that falls on the second Monday in October, that's all.