Christopher Columbus!

Well I did some looking around this morning and it seems there is a lot of controversy over the celebration of Columbus Day.

I am not a historian, nor have I studied both sides of this controversy in detail. I am painting with broad brushstrokes here.

There are of course two schools of thought – one says Columbus brought destruction, greed and death, domination and exploitation to the Americas. The other says he was a courageous explorer credited with opening up the Americas. 

Columbus’s dichotomy is a very human story. Five hundred years from now, how will our portraits hold up against the standards of time? Will they be a type of Dorian Gray composition, a dubious life painted over with the bright hopeful colors of what we wished to be, or perhaps the other way, painted as ogre-ish and ugly on the outside by others with no seeing or understanding of the softer truths of the heart inside? We tend to paint a picture of Columbus as evil villain or heroic explorer. Take your pick. Which Columbus would you like for your personal own? And will the real Columbus please stand up? 

The Columbus question can be argued ad nauseum:  his voyages to the Americas resulted in opening up and putting the continent on the map as a place of global interaction. A new set of nations and countries were brought into recorded history and entered the world stage as recognized players.

And in the course of that discovery there is the pure human horror of “man’s inhumanity to man” played out in the ugliness of the cruel exploitation and extermination of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

This story, our story, the story of the Americas, is not an uncommon or unrepeated one throughout history. But we have highlighted this part of history in our home hemisphere for special treatment and attention. And rightly so. It is our side of the world, our responsibility to look at and learn from. Perhaps our heightening sense of awareness and social consciousness is fomenting the need to take a closer look at our societal behaviors and beginnings.  Countries, peoples and races have been overtaking other countries, peoples and races for all of our known human history. Brutal expungements of entire populations and species have been our unwitting trail of development in the huge panoply of the struggle for survival. Even before recorded history the archeology of a region reveals displacement and usurpment of another’s territory and right to live. Every single human is responsible for every single act, and every single human is part of a larger, societal mindset and force that operates through each of its members to preserve itself. 

Is Columbus a hero or a demon? Or both? Even if he was completely motivated by the lust for gain – remember he was funded to produce that for Spain – somewhere at his heart he had a big vision. And he worked desperately hard to bring it to pass. Winning the support of the monarchy in Spain was his huge break. Everything he had dreamed of and wished for suddenly had financial legs to stand on and wings to fly with. What a word to us who have big dreams, ones that in the depths of our hearts seem lustrous and noble, about the judgment of time and the incalculable effects of momentum and expansion upon a kernel of creative thought when released into the stream of the societal consciousness present at its day. 

Are we responsible for that very societal consciousness? You bet we are. Every tiny kernel of it is a thought, belief or action played out across millions of interactions every day. We are building it all the time, you and I – not our leaders, not our religions, not our economies – us, just us. We are the microcosm of the whole, like the atoms and molecules and cells in a body that determine its health, strength and direction. The whole is a reflection of the individual one. And so it does come down to

Christopher Columbus

Had a dream

All did not come out

As well, it seems

As the dreamer dreamed the dream.

And so we go

Along each day

Thinking we have no power

To sway

The direction of others,

Unknowing along the way

That we have sown the seeds

Of tomorrow today