Just over a week ago, the New York City Department of Education made two schedule changes for the upcoming school year. First, snow days will now be obsolete in the district. Any school day that students do not report for in-person learning due to weather will automatically be converted to a remote learning day. No more time off for snow drifts and ice storms in New York.
The second announcement received less fanfare, likely because most Americans, myself included, thought that it was probably already policy. The department announced that New York City public schools will no longer celebrate or acknowledge Columbus Day. Students and staff will still receive the day off from classes, but no longer in honor of the Italian-born explorer. In a move that comes as no surprise given our current cultural obsession with rewriting our own history, Columbus Day will henceforth be referred to as "Indigenous People's Day."
"Indigenous People's Day recognizes that Native people are the first inhabitants of the land that became our country," NYC department of education Nathaniel Styer said. "Recognizing it on the calendar puts a spotlight on the history, cultures, and traditions of Indigenous people and we look forward to honoring this day next school year."
Multiculturalists everywhere are high-fiving each other, because to modern progressivism, Columbus is a villain of the highest order. To hear them tell the story, he was the quintessential straight "white" male, brimming with privilege and wealth, who used and abused BIPOC bodies in an orgy of death he unleashed across two continents. It doesn't matter how detached from reality portions of that narrative are – the mob has convinced themselves it's true.
Who in their right mind wants to get steamrolled by that cancel machine in order to stick up for a famous boat captain who died over five centuries ago? The majority of sane people left in our society have judiciously opted to pick their battles with the Twitter-driven outrage machine. As long as they still get that Monday off from work, they really don't care whose name is attached to it.
I get that. But I also can't help but crack up at the moral pomposity of the progressive justice brigade congratulating themselves right now. They are so concerned about the "problematic" sins of Columbus that they replace him with "indigenous" people – a group whose legacy includes more misogyny, sexual assault, human and child sacrifice, cannibalism, and unhinged violence than Christopher and his band of merry men could have committed in 1,000 lifetimes.
Start in Central America, the stomping grounds of Columbus and his fellow Spaniards. Just before the arrival of the "barbaric" Europeans, those distinguished indigenous tribes were up to many outrageous things.
Aztec priests, using razor-sharp obsidian blades, sliced open the chests of sacrificial victims and offered their still-beating hearts to the gods. They then tossed the victims' lifeless bodies down the steps of the towering Templo Mayor.
That's not exactly "singing with all the voices of the mountain" and painting "with the colors of the wind." But Tulane anthropology professor John Verano explains that indigenous folks found deep spiritual significance in their bloodthirsty ritual killings:
"It was a deeply serious and important thing for them," said Verano, before explaining that, "Large and small human sacrifices would be made throughout the year to coincide with important calendar dates, to dedicate temples, to reverse drought and famine, and more."
I can't wait to get a look at the seasonal decorations for a holiday set aside to commemorate all that.
Meanwhile, further north in the United States, archaeology seems to be indicating that the most genocidal civilizations in history – on a per-capita basis – would be native American tribes in the Southwest United States. Archaeologists from Washington State University wrote in the journal American Antiquity that upwards of 90% of the human remains we dig up from the "indigenous" period had head and upper body trauma.
"If we're identifying that much trauma, many were dying a violent death," Professor Tim Kohler acknowledged.
This is why whenever I read the latest woke prophet's tearful acknowledgement that he or she is standing on ground that was inhumanely torn from the hands of innocent native peoples, it's hard to contain the eyeroll. Not because abuse of native people is acceptable, but because it ignorantly presupposes that horrific abuse of native people wasn't already a reality long before Europeans arrived.
So again, let's make sure we fully appreciate what progressivism has brought to New York schools and will soon bring to the rest of us. In order to teach us all a valuable lesson in morality, they end all celebrations of a man who took land that wasn't his in sometimes violent ways, and replace them with public celebrations of a people group who took land that wasn't theirs, ripped beating hearts out of their own women and children, owned slaves and brutalized them, and ate each other.
Long live moral consistency.
If you are outraged over the crimes of Christopher Columbus but are willing to celebrate what was happening to women and children before he came, your ethics are a fraud.
