With Or Without School on Columbus Day?
What does the Columbus Day refer to? For those that are not so into history of America and do not know about Christopher Columbus, just the fact that he “discovered” the Americas, or so it is said, it is important that they find out that on Columbus Day, people are celebrating Columbus arrival to the Americas, which happened on 12th October 1492.
While in America the day is celebrated as the Columbus Day, in many other different parst of the United States, as Dia de la Raza or Dia de las Culturas and as even, Discovery Day, in some parts of the Bahamas. Since the late 18th century, this is a holiday that has been celebrated unofficially by the different countries in the United States. Anyhow, theoretically, the Columbus Day is calculated by the Second Monday in October each year.
Columbus is a man that is most certainly assembled with Saddam Hussein. It is worldwide known that if he was alive today, he would be one of those people that would make many crimes against humanity. While he was in reign, he lead a world of terror and this would make Hussein look like a little lamb in comparison to Columbus.
The main question remains, why any people would honor someone that lead such a harsh rule and committed so many harsh crimes against humanity. As a result, nowadays, the school children use to sing a school song, which goes as it follows: “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” Anyhow, what this song is about, has very little to do, with what exactly happened in Columbus time and with the reality back then.
Columbus Day was invented by the Knights of Columbus by the Catholic fraternal service organization. This was especially created so that the children all over America would have a role model in their lives. Therefore, he represented the Catholic hero, to which the children looked up to. The holiday was transformed into a holiday in all its righteous meaning by the Congress and the President Franklin Roosevelt, in order to honor this courageous explorer.
Anyhow, if you stay and analyze the situation a little bit, Columbus was not the first European or man, ever to discover America. Actually, the anterior man to Columbus that put his step into the American land was Leif Ericson, a Viking that founded a village – Norse village. Another point is that the “Americas discovery” is by far appoint at which people should pay so much attention to. As, the Native America used to exist 14,000 years before Columbus was even born.
Moreover, while they all learn in school that Columbus was a hero, he actually did not do so many things to be a hero, as the people that were on that island were rather friendly and they did not provide him with difficult times. THEY WERE Lucayans, Tainos and Arawaks. He was the one that forced young men and women work, provided girls aged between 9 and 10 years old to offer their services to his men, he used slaves that if resisted, they were cut their hands and their legs, if there was no food left, babies were cut to cover the food intake.
While these are not the only harsh things that Columbus did, he still is up to today a hero in the Catholic books and as well the truth is by far known by most of those that venerate him. The thing with him is that he appears in all school books, all children story, but in fact all those tales are nothing but pure fiction. Rather than Columbus, the Catholics would have had many other important people that the school children could look up to. Such people are the Mother Theresa, Saint Francis of Assisi, Betty Williams. There are many others that did many great things and are not known or studied about in the history books. This is where the Americans make a mistake. It is not useful to teach a child a bogus story, as he will eventually find out the truth when he is older, but it is more appropriate to teach him something that really happened and that is worth taken into consideration.
The Columbus Day is a holiday in which most of the Americans, especially those that are a part of the federal government offices and as well as the city offices. As far as the schools concern, it is the believe that each school will take its own decision, whether to make this a holiday for their children or not; while some of them already have decided that as long as they will make this a holiday for their children, this day will be recovered in a weekend day. Some of the institutions that will be closed are the U.S. Postal Service, the Des Moines Public Library.
It is up to the Americans decision and to the government, in especially to put this holiday as an important one and to grant the same importance to it. Anyhow, few are the Americans that realize who Columbus was, but they acre for the holiday.
